Designing the Frontier of Consumer Wallets and Onchain Superapps | Rose Kuan - Base

[Music] hi there I'm Rose and I'm super excited to present on the frontier of consumer wallets and super apps today I'm a senior product designer at Bas and I lead uh social and anything onchain apps related I make rectangles everyday at base and that's all I do I have a third culture upbring I'm born in Vancouver raised in Taiwan and moved to the states and actually funnily enough I think my background makes me a really apt expert on Asian super apps and here's why I think the Western Hemisphere that we're in right now should lean into some learnings there I've also had a background um in our history and psychology at Columbia so I'm very fascinated with um human behaviors and interoperability of blockchain cool so what is a super app um I feel like it's kind of like a foreign jargon that we've been hearing a lot of billionaires talk about we know Elon really wants a super AB he wants X to be a fully web 3 app that caters to everything all at once for me I think super app is an integrated platform that caters to all the benefits in one place so you can think of an app where you can browse trade message and and all of it is a seamless digital experience taking a look at the competitive landscape this app might be foreign to everyone until two months ago where there was a temporary Tik Tok ban in the government uh ret node has become one of the top Rising apps that are charting app store right now it's called shomu and it's basically what you can think of as the Chinese Instagram plus Pinterest plus any sort of online shopping Shopify related um platform you can discover products through content and purchase them directly in the app it's also a highly tailored algorithm to the user a lot of people say this algorithm is better than Instagram and Tik Tok because it doesn't only favor uh paid content creators it also um favors people who are just there for the virality loop so anyone who's having good content funny content can go viral on red note and the pathora features like pins live stream shopping and messaging like and sharing makes the app super robust and I actually think the ux behind this app is insane and took years of building um when you land on a super app it's usually like kind of janky you don't know what tabs uh fit along with one another but when you land on red Note Everything flows and it's just one seamless experience the other one is we chat so they took a very different approach from red note um so Wasing is a very strong Mobile payment Network in China and it's taken over Asia by storm it has really high payment rail adoption and through WeChat pay users can send money pay bills shop online and even um split restaurant bills so you can think of it as like the VMO X PayPal of Asia and what's insane about WeChat is that Chinese governments actually use this app to allow users to pay taxes book government appointments and all of these like government supportive features are integrated they're also the pioneers of mini apps which help users stay in the app and developers can build apps on top of a we chat browser if you were to get get a hair appointment done um you can immediately talk to your stylist get the thing done pay the stylist and we chat message them show up at your appointment get your rewards synced in your mini app lastly we have grab so this is one of India and Southeast Asia's biggest uh Uber slift competitor um you can book taxis private cars motorbikes you can carpool very similar to Uber and lft but what's better about grab compared to Uber and lft is that people can access really fast cashless payments so it's Finance tab uh creates opportunities for microloans Insurance investment options and they also have a really strong AI powered Dynamic pricing so it's constantly adjusting fairs and shipping out features that are very on demand that's smarter than competitors so you might start to notice a theme Here It All seemed to have a geographical bias and all these super apps are thriving in the other parts of the world but not here and just to put a number in everyone's mind um there's actually two billion plus super app users in Asia right now and all of these users are using this app daily to conduct business um their personal life sharing content all in one spot and why is that happen happening so how did Super apps really scale in Asia I think we really have to take a step back and take a look at the early outs and figure out you know what was happening with Western Technologies at the time and what is happening in Asia in the 2000s um Asia was actually playing catchup to Western Technologies now it's advancing Beyond but by the 2010s um the first iPhone launched and it was all the rage with touchscreen phones and the ability to conduct um all of these apps right in the App Store so rapid mobile adoption before desktop happened during the economic boom in Asia and it was time perfectly uh with the development of touchscreen mobile phones now people don't need a bulky laptop to do their businesses and foil apps become the place to conduct businesses in one spot something that super apps do really well is that we have four apps in the US where it's like oh I browse my content on Tik Tok I then have Facebook Market place I have PayPal um but super apps in Asia actually fills gaps of these siloed apps in one platform and on top of that um they doubled down on governmental support I think this is probably not the most like libertarian approach that the US will ever take but Chinese and Indonesian governments actually supported domestic Tech giants like tensent um bite Dance by limiting foreign competition so Facebook wasn't available in the 2010s and that led to the meteoric rise of platforms like WeChat there's also very aggressive nma strategy if you're a small fish in a big pond you get immediately eaten up by the Giants but yeah we're at a crypto conference so it kind of all seems a little bit oxymoronic we're here preaching about the concept of decentralization but there's also this highly tested ver robust super app ecosystem happening in another hemisphere that is clearly working but not here how can we find The Sweet Spot in between I think that really leads to creators building on an open protocol and creating apps that are decentralized but catering towards multiple use cases and not being siloed this is probably like the Bible of last year and if you guys haven't read this book highly recommend read right own by Chris Dixon and in this book Chris had a very good chart that I love to reference um um you see this corporate Network chart where the company is in the middle and everyone else is blocked around it the company controls all of the elements of a corporate Network creators rely on the company to earn they rely on the platform to uh distribute their content classic example Facebook algorithms Instagram developers require the company to provide API Keys uh end points to certain uh G features so they could cater towards cre creators and the users are constantly flocking back to the platform because there's nowhere else to go um these corporate networks in the 2010s have you know really accumulated so much power in social media payments that users are left with no choice to use other apps so actually in the 1990s um open source protocols were all the rage Believe It or Not RSS emails people loved it but no one was maintaining it and the reason why no one liked open source protocols is that they don't generate Revenue it's really hard to get a group of devs to just contribute on a free project where there's no incentive structure and by the 2000s um people actually soon realized owning a network is the best business model and eBay P neared this um as one of the first uh corporate networks in the 2000s and was very very successful by allowing a buy sell gig economy within their platform but this actually creates a track extract cycle you're forced to stay in the ecosystem use the tools corporates can hike up your rates and take your API away any day this happened with Twitter where they launched their business Twitter Twitter for businesses and now developers have to pay a ton of money just so they could do Twitter authorizations uh I think the most classic example here is actually the Zinga and Facebook collaboration uh if you grew up in the 2010s you've probably played Tetris Battle 2p or Farmville now all of that is gone on Facebook and the reason why is um Facebook and Zinga had a big disagreement um around 2010 that like for gaming credits and the amount they're paying zingo was also building their own social platform and Facebook was very threatened because at the time gaming was a big Revenue generation for Facebook um examples like this is countless and um here are reasons why we should avoid building another corporate Network centered around super apps so here's the question I want to ask you guys what if super apps are built in the open will that change all of these governmental interference in Asia um will it experti consumer app growth in crypto and how can we avoid building another corporate network if everything is happening in one place here's the status quo and honestly two years back my first year at Denver all three of these bullet points are impossible but we're here one um users own their content and identity on chain did now we actually have consumer apps that tie all of your identity together um number two Central no Central Authority can arbitrarily remove content or Force Integrations I think um this is kind of the uh ethos of crypto everything should be decentralized the user should own their content and lastly interoperable databases when you log on Facebook your username is not going to be the same as the one for riot games or the one you're using for PayPal imagine a decentralized identity where all of the databases are catering to one name and you no longer have a fra fragmented identity and we're all here and this is all achieved at this point I think where we should be right now is actually creating a seamless ux across onchain apps let's be real onchain apps are still like a little janky and hard to use I think you still see like crazy transaction hash is a lot of these um very complex ideas aren't ausc um the other one goes back to that RSS and email argument there's really no good incentive structure to help reward onchain devs we had ideas about Dows we had ideas about onchain rewards like what sta sta iio is doing um but how can we keep the onchain devs in one ecosystem I think um super apps could actually help power that if we create a really good incentive structure on building mini apps on the open protocol creators and developers directly earn um and having a distribution platform with so many users using it um could really help devs just like uh contribute to the space I think lastly is ditching multiple single-purpose apps I have like 20 things bookmark in my coinbase wallet browser and it's so hard to just like find these apps I they honestly sometimes they all look the same what if there's a world where we could access blockchain with ease and just dish all of these single purpose apps and go into one place and I'm not saying that there should be one app that dominates everything like how it's happening in Asia I think there should be an ecosystem of blossoming super apps and we're constantly learning from each other on how we can improve each of these feature sets and we're actually in inching closer which is really exciting so today I'm going to share a couple examples from the crypto space today that is already somewhat a super app forecaster launched wallet 3 days ago and now you have a really powerful social media platform embedded within a wallet um you can send tip creators you can tap a frame which is essentially mini apps and conduct transactions in frames and it's fully on the blockchain I think what's really powerful about this one is if we could integrate onchain wallets with social and messaging you can start to see that weat example come to life what if your a local barber or your local nail salon took foraster walless addresses and you can just wire some um ethon base to your um technician I think that's where um the reward system and like the point system can come in and get the whole flywheel going the other one is more on the salana land um vector. fun I think this was the hottest app of the last two months the tensor guys are extremely talented and this is their take on social trading I think this one is still a little bit more Deen forward um users can share and broadcast trading activities in real time it's super uh Community Centric so you're kind of uh following like a top Trader and you know copy trading I think this is still very much the extract cycle of meme coins but what's really interesting about this one is you you're starting to see some social Network effect butting up people are sharing their pnls on X um they're sharing their gains and people are excited about trading and I think if um we can build a super app around trading and integrating wallets um this one will be a really really good app to watch out for last one is a more established player uh ton so this is telegram's open network you've probably seen this cute hamster at some point in your life this is hamster combat one of the top Telegram um mini apps of last year it's a telegram gaming uh game finance app and what's really awesome about telegram is that they've already established themselves as a huge player for endtoend encryption file transfers and messaging features now they're doubling down on Mini apps and interactions with Defi and I think just using the app it feels very clean and smooth and they have a really good developer incentive program to keep the developers going because they have so many users around ready cool so lastly um I want to leave you guys with some notes here are the four things that we touched on today social messaging trading and payments they're all four different apps right now I think in web 2 you have Facebook you have potentially telegram trading um you have some sort of product like Robin Hood payments you have PayPal in web two today uh sorry in web 3 today you have a forecaster you have telegram you have coinbase.com and for payments you probably use something like uh if you're in a swap pool you use Unis swap or you use like a phantom wallet what if all four of these could uh layer up to rewards on for Builders and building on an open protocol what would that world look like and I think it will land super perfectly into a single super app where devs are incentivized to build mini apps on top of they can decide if they want to leave the ecosystem anytime they have the option to um go into other ecosystems and try out new super apps but just having an open protocol where everyone can build together and you know really maximize that snowball effect of a super app and getting a lot of users using one product or multiple super apps at the same time cool there's a saying at base and is lfb let's build but I'm really excited to see all the devs um look at right now we're in this room to explore the ideas of super app and yeah don't be a stranger um come say hi or um connect with me after the conference thank you