Engage-to-Earn, SocialFi, and the Dream of Mass Adoption l KBW2024

about I would say x to earn um we saw a lot of adoption for a lot of these platforms uh step to earn sleep to earn um I just saw Vape to earn so that's really cool we're going to pay people to smoke um a lot of these apps saw initial initial success and then Most of It kind of declined not only with the market itself because who's going to end up paying people to do this stuff so should everything be externed can we do sleep turn what's a gimmick what's not and how do we create sustainable models where actually this will be you know going forward not a short run because I haven't seen an economy of any of these daps just yet that has more than an internal token economy the good way to think about it is we have trillions and trillions of dollars in in X to earn economies the biggest one is work to earn that we practice for thousands of years the most recent one is pay attention to earn which is attention economy and it's huge 7 trillion and one thing that you notice in theme that actions to earn that are successful are inherently valuable which is the reason why we're going for physical activity because we know that it is inherently valuable to users so not everything ex to earn will be successful but that those actions that are valuable objectively and there are third parties willing to pay for it will be exactly where are those third parties but yeah um thoughts no we have NHS paying us already in the UK okay thoughts what what are your thoughts I mean to your point I mean there are clearly situations in which that that will work the work turn which always cracks me up I make that joke too um I think typically and it kind of falls into a situation we see a lot in the crypto space of just incredibly inflationary models that are uh not self-sustaining over the long run and very short-term incentives for whether it's the people behind them or the people who are participating that kind of fade away so in yes there are situations historically that have worked but I think in a lot of cases it's setting these projects and its users up for a very you know short amount of time for s a short amount of success I'd say yeah because as I said as it said earlier want more participation um so this work to earn there's this thing called an employer he pays me um in this attention to earn there's thing called an Advertiser he pays me when how do all these corporations get into that Healthcare Providers insurers employers ultimately governments are all benefiting from your physical activity we just conducted big resarch for use case of walking I understand that let's let's play to earn for example is a little bit harder to justify but maybe so it's not not simple Vape to earn for example is a freaking joke I you know kind what about social medias things like that do we see a situation where that's going to push that um like again the post to earn engage to earn and how do you do that while not cooking the numbers as we talked backstage and just getting a bunch of agents and uh and whatever AI to click yeah I mean there there are projects out there that are doing interesting things around like boost to earn so if you are a Creator on you know like whatever Tik Tok in Instagram pick your favorite social platform um you know you can if you boost someone else's post you comment you tweet you whatever you you you help hack the algorithm to like drive more engagement for whatever the thing is because everyone knows that the social media algorithms are you know if you're not spending money you know they're they're advertising companies that's how they make money um if you can find a way to hack those alos in that way that's very interesting so there are other like two earn strategies too that I think have some Merit and could be very interesting similar to like the walk walk to earn stuff which certainly is is working in in in many markets thoughts I think especially important for developers sitting here trying to build application um I provide a very different perspective I think you should look at extra earn as a goto Market strategy and your real tokenomics that's long-term sustainable that should be something tied to proof of what it's either proof of work and you somehow can put the work on on the internet and and or on blockchain that's that could prove itself like for example WAP to earn could be cheated like there are millions of ways to cheat it right the system is not robust the the the reason why uh poof of work of the BTC is so beautiful it's because it's it's proven by math right so uh I think I think don't mess with uh exra earn with the proof of something uh I think those are two very different things I'm I'm totally fine with your extra earn if you're trying to to use some airdrop expectation whatever that you can leverage to bring users on board but make sure you have ultimately a a very unique um proof of something that's um encrypted properly um and and mathematically proven it's going to work economically um so so that would be the thing that retain user and bring value that's why we need decentralization so i' offer this as a final question maybe um well getting final it why don't all these l1s that have all this money occurred you the model of EX we're saying who we just need people to pay for these activities as these daps onboard all these users why don't all this infrastructur start putting money into these specific apps for the sole purpose of getting more people to onboard to their actual blockchains so they put in whatever budget then you'll do whatever want and it might not be a 20-year company I think they are doing it already yeah but then we're we might onboard some million people to the to the platforms and then the developers can start getting them to do other things about uh you're absolutely right they do it but people don't know how to build for Mass adoption everyone is doing it millions of dollars in Grants that's not going to work no no no no genuinely I mean you look at most apps they built for the web how many people in the world have a laptop or desktop it needs to be on the mobile and it needs to be mobile native app because everyone uses apps web on the mobile is not great second is ux and nain was talking about it that ux for web 3 DBS is horrendous 24 words scribble them with a nail on a metal piece split it into two halves hide it into different geographical locations what I mean this crazy right so we need to be fixing that and the third and actually that's my biggest bug bear everyone is focusing on tvl you cannot build a product for next million people if you're focusing on tvl because it is faster to make five phone calls and get whales to come to you and then you're going to have cop of existing product than to build for the next million people perfect I'd love the three other participants to answer that question and then we're going to lock it out you know think about the people you meet at this amazing conference um the majority of people who work on actual systems here are developers where are the designers you know this is a this is I it always cracks me up when I see the makeup of a team that's working on like infrastructure or any even anything even like applications like I can't agree with you more we don't have product people just product for for a crowd like this for a for a amazing conference like this there needs to be at least probably 3 to 5x the number of creative Talent design Talent product talent that actually understands how to build consumer products and that's not present yet so that is an opportunity for us as an industry going forward and then I think we'll see a lot of opportunities change you cannot have a world where it takes 10 steps including kyc for someone to go from cold start to being an onchain user and expect any form of adoption that's just [ __ ] what are your thoughts I mean everyone always asks where the new users are and then you ask them to your point like they go through 10 steps in a process every step that you add is going to see significant drop off in people that continue on that path right like the UI ux of most products out there today even the most heavily used ones on chain are not suitable for mainstream users and there's not been nearly enough Focus even we're talking about infrastructure let's talk about payments let's talk about onboarding let's talk about sign in let's talk about wallet abstraction and making it significantly easier for new users to come to a platform not need to care that it's powered by crypto again because it's just something they're interested in and works really really seamlessly with um different components to the onboarding process that they've already seen rather than sign in with W with wallet fund wallet and all of these different things that people have no experience with and and then if we're going to be interoperable I also need to have the gas tokens of all these different things and then I need to it's like a user saying let's move from aul to AWS right now for this server and we don't owe we don't owe um you know non- crypto native users are not incentivized nor do they owe us anything of using the products that we've built it's on us to create an experience that entices them to actually get onboarded like they owe us nothing on that front but this is another reason why we're in infrastructure bubble because if you compare it with an internet anyone remembers how Yahoo looked in 1998 99 I didn't I don't think they had designers the portal age it was horrendous so we are tracking exactly the same development and it is going to get better and quickly all right anything to add wrap it up I think uh the hardest part it's actually finding that use case that actually needs crypto um and the use case that needs the proof of whatever that somehow the aggre like because of the system that you design the the toe economics that you design and and therefore you can you can foresee a future of this um econom the overall productivity of this economy it's going to be much bigger than what it is right now so and that that's the secret of of of of finding a good use case and that's the actual challenging part all right we're done and let's just hope that use case is not meme coins because come on we're done all right perfect thank you very much and thank you for our great panelists come on [Music]