Consumer Crypto
Author: Nick Tomaino, Founder of 1 confirmation
In the next decade, what I firmly believe is that crypto applications will permeate various aspects of culture. The past decade has focused on deep technology and finance, but in the next ten years, we will see consumer crypto applications colliding with different domains such as news, politics, sports, health/fitness, music, live streaming, podcasts, and more. These applications will become some of the most useful and valuable applications ever.
This may seem contrary to the mainstream view of investors who continue to invest heavily in zero-sum products lacking innovation. While the community platforms discuss scalable L1s and yield-bearing stablecoins, developers are quietly working on products that can stimulate new consumer behaviors, helping us reach over 1 billion users as quickly as possible and bring benefits to the world.
In the past decade, I have learned a lot from many early consumer applications that successfully connected crypto and culture, attracting new users (e.g., Coinbase, Opensea, Polymarket, dYdX, etc.). If you are considering the next generation of top consumer crypto applications, here are four lessons that might be useful:
1. Mass adoption does not happen immediately, so focus on something you believe in beyond money and persevere for years. Polymarket has been considered a failure multiple times, but founder Shayne Coplan and his team still believe in the belief that prediction markets can “bring more truth to the world.” They have encountered many obstacles on this path, which would have made most people give up, but their firm belief in something less obvious and deeper than money has helped them survive. Polymarket’s trading volume exceeded $423 million in 2024 and now plays a crucial role in the 2024 US presidential election. Belief and persistence always pay off.
2. The intersection between purists and tourists is crucial. Coinbase has cleverly positioned itself at the intersection of purists and tourists in the past decade. If a product is too pure, it will remain niche and never break through. There may be a small group of people immersed in historical knowledge, appreciating subtle differences and loving it, but building for purists will limit your market size. If a product caters too much to tourists, people may like it briefly but eventually leave. Quick come, quick go. In 2012, Brian Armstrong (Coinbase founder) made an early product design decision to provide custodial wallet services to users, believing that non-custodial wallets would not contribute to massive market growth. Thanks to this decision, Coinbase is now a publicly traded company valued at over $50 billion.
3. Deeply understand the users and the culture of your market. When Opensea launched in 2018, other NFT marketplaces raised more funds and involved more prominent investors. Opensea prevailed because founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah didn’t care about false reputation or creating false narratives around the company; they simply focused on building a useful product. They talked to every NFT creator, attended every NFT event, and understood the culture better than their competitors. Don’t worry about surface narratives, dig deeper, and you will outlast those playing perception games.
4. Block out existing tribal noise and create your own tribe. Truly useful applications don’t need to choose and please any existing tribes; they can create their own. dYdX has shown the way in this aspect. Founder Antonio Juliano and his team initially started within the Ethereum ecosystem, then launched L2 supported by Starkex (a Layer-2 scaling engine by StarkWare), and then launched dYdX Chain supported by Cosmos SDK. This may become more common in the future. Once you prove the utility of your application, you can fully independent and launch your own chain instead of relinquishing much control and value to existing chains.
Consumer crypto in the past decade has been interesting, but the next decade will be even more interesting, at least from my perspective. Thank you for reading.
