Educating Newbies: Crypto is More Than a Wallet Balance - Laurisha Cotton

all right hello i am larissa anigas cotton i'm with valora app and i'm here to talk about how we can educate newbies in the space so let's jump in here so velora we are a mobile payments app on the cello blockchain and we're on a mission to unlock access to financial opportunity so everyone can create and share value without barriers and i am here to make sure that crypto is fun and easy to learn so i want to see how many of you own crypto but haven't used it yet there's no shame here no a couple that's okay great welcome i hope this is helpful how many of you only use crypto to mint or buy nfts okay we are all in here for doing many things and then what if you're adapt that's trying to attract new users a couple of you that's great and then i assume the rest of you are maybe degens and you're like very into this so entering web 3 let's see how people are in this space so believe it or not only 13 of crypto users are power users meaning that they are in defy apps and they understand that everything that's happening into crypto which means 87 of people are just holding or huddling 87 and yet our conference has like what 15 000 people here so there's a lot of work to be done and many people are learning about crypto online so why are people just holding they don't want to lose money common sense right but what about they are overwhelmed with the self-custody wallets such as metamask and so this even happened yesterday i was with my uber driver and i was telling him i was coming to eat denver and he's like oh i own crypto and i was like oh that's great like which ones do you own he was talking to me about them and i said oh what wallet do you use he's like oh i only use coinbase i'm like why is that he's like well i don't know what else i would do with crypto so that's where we are and he's been in the space for three years buying crypto so that just showed me that we have a lot way to go so how do we get there we get there through education as we all know crypto is way more than buying nfts you can use it for remittances you can use it for ubi purposes and many more so a recent study by gemiini found out that of the people they surveyed 53 of women identified as cryptocurious so they made it past the the newbie process and then 47 of men were cryptocurious and then 74 of crypto holders were male so we're hoping that a lot more women come into the space and i can relate to this so this is a little bit about my story in 2016 i read about bitcoin in a legal paper and i thought this isn't for me it's not going to affect me and lo and behold here i am many years later on this stage then i went to ethereal san francisco in 2017 heard all the buzzwords didn't really quite understand but knew that i needed to keep up with it then in 2018 i went to south by southwest and this is where i learned the actual use cases of all of the blockchains and everything that really stood out to me is how you can use cryptocurrency to help refugees and camps and that's when i knew i wanted to be involved in this project but it wasn't until 2020 that i actually use my metamask to do something so that may be shocking but let's see how that happened it was believe it or not a baby shower at work at work we had a couple of colleagues that had a baby and one of my colleagues said hey how about we send each to each of them so that they can use that and i was like that's great and then she realized a couple of us didn't actually know what to do so that she made a one-pager and then that's how i was onboarded into this great ecosystem and so using that baby shower example i want to show what we can do in real life but before we do that so we i went from just holding but now i use eight daps with velour and metamask i averaged 10 transactions per month and i just recently have eighty dollars in rewards earned in veloura app we have a 25 rewards program based upon your stablecoin balance so these are the four steps that you can help new users really on board and do more with their crypto one keep it simple so let's go with our baby shower example again it was a one-pager literally with screenshots so that simple secondly promote opportunities my colleague was literally slacking me and like hey you can do this three is earned trust i trusted my colleague i know her i worked with her for years so i knew she wasn't going to just tell me to do something and then leave me hanging fourth is an everyday reason every baby shower you go to will have a gift component so that's great we did a baby shower but let's take this into a real life with an active dab so velora i mentioned supercharge we used to have a supercharged program at 50 earnings or excuse me 50 rewards on your crypto so keeping it simple we literally put that in an image do you want 50 more crypto of course we want 50 more crypto that's great promote it within the app we had a card up top reminding people if they added more to their balance they would actually be receiving more rewards and earning more rewards number three earn trust we literally were sharing reviews five stars reviews these are real reviews happening in the world that it is easy to use your crypto fourth is giving an everyday reason so my colleague arvin here he bought crypto with his stable coin balance within velora so we made a tick talk about how you can buy a frappuccino using veloura again in everyday reason so using these examples is showing your users how they can actually do something with their crypto besides just holding so once they learn we also need to get new people by harnessing the power of social media which i think we all know we're probably all on twitter right now but this is my probably my most controversial slide we need to branch out we need to go into youtube instagram and tick tock so an example of this last year i spoke at fordham university in the fall my friend's a professor believe it or not there is a degree in social media now and there was a class of 40 40 and about 50 percent of them were outside of the united states and i asked them how many of you have a twitter account in a room of 40 people one person had a twitter account everyone else had an instagram account and a tick tock account and that to me showed me that we need to be fully branching out so this right now is a social media landscape the largest circle is the largest platform so you can see youtube 2 billion users instagram 1.1 billion youtube 41 excuse me um and then twitter's 206 million tick tock is 84 million okay that's great we love that but the thing to me that sticks the most out from the slide is the average twitter user only spent 3.5 minutes a day on the app if you took that in comparison instagram is 53 minutes and tick tock is 52 minutes and tick tock stack is this is wild to me but 90 percent of tick tock users log in every single day compared to twitter where it's only about 46 so based upon these numbers we need to be making sure that we have content that is going out in all these social media channels so you're like hey that's great but how do we actually do this so at valora we have done a couple of tutorials and now you're going to see the cache and tutorial soon and we wanted to literally show our users through screen recordings how they can use the app so even though we have tic-tac we did actually download the video and then share on twitter and then from that these two tutorials one to cash in with ramp second one is using nom space nom space see that as like an ens but for the cello blockchain these two tutorials brought in 13 more views than all of our youtube videos combined from these both of these videos are underneath two minutes long so we literally were teaching crypto concepts and underneath two minutes and then for nomspace i know their founder he damned me that after we launched this tutorial on twitter they received 50 more users and names in 24 hours so i'm just going to do a little bit of this clip of this tutorial if it loads we'll see if not maybe this is your reason to follow tick tock or velour on tick tock we'll go to the next one next slide so let's go to fun content so we saw those tutorials they were pretty fun and we decided that most of people outside of crypto twitter or just twitter in general they do have a life outside of and we should be interacting with them so we made a really fun olympic stop of what is your cello dap olympic style of literally doing like what is the nathan chen of the cello dapps and we did those and then we did one our most popular one which is loading is screenwriting in the age of crypto and we literally changed famous movie lines into crypto lines and so really what you want to do is just avoid buzzwords make it fun because if it's fun people will then reshare and then they're learning about your dap and crypto so once while you're making all of this content it's important to know you need to respect your audience so i don't know if any of you saw the four super bowl crypto ads but i'm a part of social media twitter believe it or not there is a thing i've been doing social media for 12 years and i follow a few folks and one of these folks she's the leader at hubspot and has a lot of followers she was saying the green light ad was more helpful than any of the crypto ads which is a hot take and she actually has nfts and is in the web 3 space so it's not like she's not so that's when i asked her i'm like hey what's up with that and she said well crypto ads relied on buzzwords and hype messaging without transparency or trying to educate non-believers and i thought that was so informative that we need to talk in a language that people understand and not talk down the other thing is while you're doing this let's pretend you're doing more than social media you should make things personal so if you have a discord make sure that you have a way that when new people join your discord that you're welcoming them into the community making sure that you have a community manager let's pretend that you're a small team you're like i don't have time to do this a community manager there are agencies that you can hire to help with you let's pretend you don't have funds for an agency there are these things you can have an intern so what's great about the crypto community is a lot of these universities have blockchain clubs and there are students that are so eager to help out with a project and want to learn so if you onboard them into your dap and let them help you with their community they already have a lot of people on their club it's a perfect way to do things and that it is also an affordable way the other thing is to stay connected so that may be a monthly newsletter it could be a zoo meetup it could be reddit amas because even though someone downloads your app they you need to remind them how to actually do things with the dap that you have and so this is my shameless plug that if you want to learn about the cello dapps veloura has a newsletter that every week we send you a new cello dap for you to learn about and we're literally teaching you how you can use cellodapps within your veloura wallet and velour is mobile first so you don't have to leave your phone at all you can do everything when you're writing the subway if you're in an uber you can interact with velora doing that the other thing to do is partner with educationwords so i learned a lot about d5 through shifi so that's my shout out to the shifai community and there's great other ones of my bff and kryptos boycott but there's also getcoin kernel so there are other organizations that you can literally partner with and help each other so these are a few of my like examples of doing a twitter space with boys club you can also tag people in your community so that people can learn about what what they can do with your wallet or your dap and then chief is really taking it with instagram of literally doing a defy dictionary these are just a few examples they're doing amazing work so we're talking about content making sure where you're sharing it re-sharing what you make on tick tock to twitter making sure that things are educational so that's how we're going to spread the love but the one thing i want you to walk away from is knowing that believe it or not to someone you are their most og crypto friend so don't be surprised when you get the text of like hey how do i do this you just have to understand that like that's what's gonna happen and that's what we need to do and i didn't think i was og i'm like hey i didn't like use metamask until 2020 and then my friend told me she's like no you're the only person that like uses metamaster i know so can you help me and i'm like sure so that when you walk away from here knowing that all the knowledge that you have be ready to share that with others and that some people may need a little bit of hand-holding but imagine what they can do in this great ecosystem so i hope that was very informative of how to educate newcomers into the space if you want you can download valora here we are a mobile payments app with really low gas fees less than a cent and we are all about making crypto easy if you can text you can crypto thank you