Building Crypto-lite - Joseph Schiarizzi

hey there we go awesome thank you so much for coming out everybody um this is crypto light and we're building inspiring amazing onboarding experiences for normal people to bring them into dapps and teach them about how great it is to be a user of real powerful crypto apps uh so i'm joseph i'm a developer i've been building nfts for several years and have worked on user experiences for a lot of your favorite dapps and now i'm working on nifty chess to bring nfts to millions of chess players and new ways to create revenue for really popular chess streamers so we're also hiring front-end devs if that's you and you want to help us onboard millions of chess players uh hit me up so crypto light what does this word mean um i came up with this word and it is a way to describe the user experience of adap such that you're giving your power users your crypto native users the tools and things that they expect to do really powerful things with crypto but most people that doesn't describe them for most people they don't know what wallets are they don't want to know what wallets are and we need to come up with better ways as developers to make our dapps more user more approachable and more simple so this talk is really a challenge to everyone here at east denver this week uh whatever you're building consider building a crypto lite version of it and build an app that people actually want to use and maybe that's not necessarily the people here at east denver who are also developers but make an app that normal people want to use and will be happy using so we have these problems with whatever dap you were coming here to try to make this weekend um and there it's going to be users who find your app and what are they going to say some of them are going to like it because they love crypto and other ones are going to have a problem with it and those problems are actually user experience challenges and we can think about it as other people just being negative and we don't have to we don't have to think about them or we can think about it in the terms of what are the things that we can do to convince them that actually this movement is really powerful and beneficial to creators and there's a lot of uh positive positive benefits to uh crypto and the power that we give our users um so one of the most popular ones that you're going to find is we hate crypto because i heard crypto has a negative environmental impact and that's really important to me personally and a lot of other people and overcoming that is more than just messaging it's actually a user experience challenge so maybe a year ago or two years ago there wasn't the support for side chains and roll ups that there is today and ethereum is really scaling it's happening before our very eyes and it's no longer optional to uh decide whether or not you want to support layer two chains and proof of stake chains that are environmentally friendly and energy efficient if you want to build an app that has a million users it has to be energy efficient and that is that is a user experience challenge and the way to solve that is through roll ups through layer twos and just supporting networks like polygon and gnosis chain it it's not super complicated and your users don't need to know what those are to know that your app is energy efficient and environmentally friendly so just by deploying just by deploying on polygon or gnosis chain we've already convinced some of the people here that they loved apps which is great so we can just keep moving down what are the other user experience challenges that people finding our app are having problems with a really big one um maybe some people who who has seen this video in the top right passed around yeah okay so a handful um it's a really it's a really uh a good criticism of why crypto is stupid and nfts are dumb uh and you know we can we can turn our backs to that and say well actually i know it's really powerful and uh it has a lot of benefits and my users love it uh and the power that it gives them or we can actually solve all of the challenges and uh every criticism come back with an improved experience and an improved dev stack in our app that solves all of those challenges so the main one in this video and a popular criticism is we don't like nfts because they're really just a scam to get you to buy crypto so let's just build apps that don't make you buy crypto and we can still give all of our users the power and the things that we like about crypto without normal users coming into the ecosystem having to actually buy any so we have wire nifty chest uses wire for direct debit card and credit card checkouts so you can buy nfts directly with your credit and debit card sell them in the marketplace and earn crypto this is another reason why um organizations like git coin have been really successful because it's a way to get experience and to be able to experience all of the benefits of working in crypto and and the benefits of defy and controlling your own digital assets but without having to put up your own money you're just putting up your own time right so giving people one ways to earn in your app and two to join your app directly with fiat on ramps it's really a really important part of this stack so just from just from adding a checkout with credit card uh we've already convinced a bunch more people that our dap is worth using and they love it so another thing people have seen crypto prices go up and down and they're very scared i don't want to join a crypto app where if any money i put into it you know might go down ninety percent or up ninety percent volatility is scary to people and also we've heard a lot of things about uh fees and you know do i have to pay for that and that can be really confusing um so some of the most successful and largest and most uh scaling apps right now are eternal gg um derek who was up here earlier actually sky weaver just launched the beta recently and treasure chest the app that i'm working on at nifty chess does as well is we've actually priced everything in usdc so we have we have x die on gnosis chain which is pegged to a dollar we have usdc which is pegged to a dollar and the entire uh the entire criticism of it's too volatile to actually be useful um is completely invalidated when you make your marketplace and price things in usdc and that doesn't actually take away any of the power you're giving your power users because they know that they can take the usdc they've earned in the marketplace and go yield farm with it somewhere else or swap it into other tokens that they prefer to hold so your power users are still going to use whatever tokens they want but you can just make this experience better of using your app by using pegged stable coins in your marketplaces um so this is something you should really seriously consider so just from that we've already convinced more than half of the audience that our dap is really cool and and solved a lot of these user experience problems just from simple design decisions and the stack that we're choosing to build on the next the next kind of group that you run into is you know we don't like wallets privacy it's scary downloading metamask is scary having money inside a web browser extension is really scary for normal people and that's not something that normal people are used to doing so let's just not do that at nifty chess we've decided you know we could go and target who's our target user is it people who have downloaded metamask no it's people who are playing games of chess on chess.com our users are not crypto people right we're trying to build something that has millions of normal people normal users around the world and we're not going to be able to do that if we require people to download a browser extension so if your app is still login with metamask in the top right corner it looks exactly the same as it doesn't did in 2017 and really this developer stack for how you allow your users to log in has come so far it's seriously time to start taking advantage of that so there are secure platforms that we're using now to allow people to log in with web2 and be given an ethereum address and we can use that address on our layer twos that we were talking about so at nifty chess we've allowed all of our users to log in with their chess.com account right how many how many millions of users does metamask have i'm not sure exactly it's it's in the tens of millions i think but chess.com has 50 million monthly active users that's an order of magnitude more than any live dap anywhere on ethereum or any side chain and now we have a way to give every single one of them an ethereum wallet and onboard them into our dapps and our ecosystem so tools like taurus and fortmatic are providing this service so you don't have to think about cryptography if you're a developer building adapt and this is another part of this stack that's really important to onboarding the next million users that you should really consider consider adding so basically we just convinced everybody right we've gone through all of their concerns and address them and those concerns of reasons why they hate crypto and why they hate nfts again they're really user experience challenges and the way to solve that is just by adding to our stack and making it more friendly to use so there's always going to be some people that say we hate crypto and we're just going to turn our back on it and there's nothing you can do even if you solve the problems that we have with it we're still going to hate it and that's the void and we don't listen to them which is fine because we've just onboarded millions of people by solving these problems anyway so a quick summary is you should be using web2 logins if you want to build an app that normal people want to use web 2 logins energy efficient layer 2s pay the fees on behalf of your user don't even let them know that there are fees happening and make sure that your marketplaces are using stable coins and pricing assets in stable coins and creating ways that people can actually earn and get into crypto and be onboarded to it through your dap rather than just extracting from your users and if you do these things they will love you and you'll be more successful overall and your dapps will just be more fun and more loved so this is really focuses on consumer dapps and again this is this is my challenge to everyone building this weekend try to add one or two parts of this to whatever adapt you're working on at the hackathon and your stack will be so much more powerful because of that um so that's my talk thank you for coming i'm joseph from nifty chess i'm hiring front end developers to help me onboard tens of millions of chess users in the world and create really amazing user onboarding experiences thank you [Applause]