And why mass adoption will be slow
By now, we’ve grown familiar with the routine of web3 projects, token launches, and NFT drops. It all goes down in the depths of the Discord servers, twitter threads, and social forums.
“If you know you know”.
Unfortunately, if you’re not in the “know,” you’ll probably miss out on some pretty cool early opportunities. Moreover, you might miss out on web3 altogether.
As with all new technology with legs, there’s a powerful tribe around crypto. The tribe largely consists of the people who were there from the beginning coupled with a group of lagging, yet early, adopters who have done a lot of research. If you happen to be part of one of these groups, good on you. You’ll probably get access to some cool shit through your array of Discord servers and crypto threads.
But what if you’re not part of the community yet?
In web3, we keep talking about ‘mass adoption’ and the work we have ahead of us to get there. The community shares a common goal to bring crypto to the masses and help people unlock the freedom that web3 offers. However, today’s tight knit crypto community is one of the things blocking mass adoption. It’s really hard to get involved. Why?
How did your buddy find that NFT project in its infancy, make a solid profit, and get involved in the projects DAO? Where would you go to find projects just like that? Or how would you find the best DeFi tools to help you solve a financial pain point in your life? Where is everything?
In my view, one of the biggest lost opportunities in web3 is that it’s ‘unfindable’. Where do you go to discover all these innovative DeFi projects that people keep raving about? What’s the quickest way to find what you need and get started before you have to pick up the kids from soccer practice and prepare dinner for the family?
This is the reality of most people today. We don’t all have time to be ‘cypherpunks’ and spend our days deep in web3.
And guess what? ‘Most people’ will drive mass adoption. Of course this is a multi-layered problem and I discuss the problem of user experience in this article. But before user experience becomes a problem, people need to find the products and today, web3 tools are ‘unfindable’ for most people. What’s the solution?
Search Engine Optimization.
I know I know. Dirty web2 technologies don’t belong in web3. Unfortunately, if that’s how you feel, web3 will never become what we dream of. We need to make web3 products findable so people who aren’t deep in the communities can find them when they’re trying to solve a problem. In simple terms, this means we need to create a lot of content and remove a lot of jargon. Let’s look at an example using Aave.
Before moving on, I want to point out that I’m a massive fan, user, and token holder of Aave and this is not me picking on them in particular. It’s a great protocol.
This is the front page of the Aave blog on Mirror. Their latest article was published in March of this year and it means nothing to a regular user (unless you’re in the Aave community of course). The launch of Aave v3 is not a catalyst for new users to get started in DeFi. It doesn’t solve a problem for the user. Instead, we need more people thinking about why somebody would use Aave? What problem does it solve for them or how does it make their busy lives easier?
Perhaps a better approach would be a series of blog articles focused on how users can lend money in exchange for interest. The twist being that they can withdraw their money at any time without penalty. This is an amazing benefit for someone with some extra money lying around that they want to earn some yield on but aren’t comfortable locking away their money. It’s a situation where a user would actually search for a solution. Increased capital efficiency and protocol liquidity are not terms that the end user would be looking for.
This is a small example and may not be perfect but there are numerous examples like this all across web3. In fairness, you can’t do everything at once. Building the products and developing new innovations in this young space is a behemoth of a task by itself and there’s plenty of work left to be done. But that’s why I’m convinced that this is the edge any new web3 team should be leveraging. If we build web3 technologies and tell a web2 story, we’ll be many steps closer to mass adoption.
Taking a web2 search engine approach to crypto and web3 won’t just help capture new users. This approach will also give you an unfair advantage in capturing existing demand from people who are already doing their own research. There’s a massive segment of people hearing about crypto and web3 for the first time in 2022 and they are looking to understand what it all means. Let’s say they are surfing the internet trying to learn a bit more and they come across Aave’s blog. Do you think this will get them more excited about web3 or turn them off?
Another example is the Ethereum merge. Once mainstream media started paying attention to the merge, searches on Google skyrocketed.
Ethereum had prepared for this brilliantly by setting up a raft of helpful resources and informative content that explained the merge in simple terms. This is something that can be found in the “Learn” section of Ethereum.org. It’s worth noting that Ethereum have been doing this for a long time and because of this diligent effort to educate the end user, they captured a massive amount of attention during the merge spike.
In the graph below we see a very simple flow chart. I’ve borrowed this from Aaron Barefoot, SEO Manager at Polkadot. We’re currently seeing a big influx in the “Demand” portion of this chart. It’s a pivotal moment for the web3 community to shift the communication towards the end user and away from the developers. If we can learn to educate people about the tremendous use cases of web3 in a similar way to Ethereum, I think we’ll begin to see a steady uptick in adoption over time.
The good news for project teams? This is still a largely untapped resource and you have an opportunity to capture massive market share from off the back of this demand/interest.
Once we make web3 tools findable and capture the increased interest and demand from users, we’re left with one more big challenge.
If new users have, by some miracle, made their way to the front gates of a web3 community, it’s usually as far as they’ll go.
Let’s say you’ve come across a cool new DeFi app. You’re still not quite sure what DeFi is, but the use case of this application looks pretty cool. To find out more about how to use it, the website directs you to a Discord link. Unless you’re a gamer or web3 native, you’ve probably never seen Discord before. You land on the Discord server and are promptly greeted with 20+ channels, each one with an ongoing conversation happening, and a chat log that looks something like this.
Where do you start? What does it all mean? How do you find what you came for?
The onboarding journey is non-existent. For someone who doesn’t know how to navigate the stormy seas of Discord, this is probably where they bookmark their tab in the “Come back when I’m retired” folder.
It’s not just the mess of Discord though. It’s the jargon. Everyone uses jargon and references that are just impossible to keep up with unless you’re a crypto native or it’s your job. But there’s nowhere else to go. No resource hub, no explainer videos, no nothing.
I love Discord and I have a great time in various chat rooms with the communities I’m part of. The members are incredibly kind and helpful for anyone looking to learn more. But let’s face it. Discord sucks. At best, it’s not fit for purpose. And this makes the community unbreachable for new entrants.
An excellent example of a web3 tool doing the opposite is the hardware wallet Ledger. I purchased my first Ledger Nano S Plus hardware wallet earlier this year and the onboarding experience was excellent. From purchase to delivery, unpacking, and setup, Ledger guides you through it step by step and makes it super easy.
The onboarding experience is crystal clear and there’s lots of supporting and educational content available for new users. It makes sense.
