Bridging the Gap - Web 2.5 with Jing Sun, Ashley Davila, Azi Mandias, Sichao Yang, Caseem Ward

let's start so I think you know this is the biggest question about our industry it's about Mass adoption when we look at the market cap one trillion is a big but this one trillion you know dollar market cap has to be backed by a very big you know uh scale of the users right so right now I think the biggest problem is how we bring more users it's not only about millions of early adopters it's about you know how we can bring the 100 million even billions of the you know web to users into the Webster I think just had two parts are very important one is about the Simplicity or the usability of the webstery project and second part is about you know how we can really kind of you know increase the utility just like what's why people are coming here I think these two parts right now is the biggest challenge and for the first part I think all those developers right now are working on how to kind of just like simplify and unify the user experience so right now the wallet you know uh and experience a really really a biggest kind of you know the blockage enough to bring the people there and you know just like you will talk about you know how to simplify the user experience how to kind of just like make you know the people get into uh you know the the app easier so that's a big part I think the second part very important just like if we bring them here what do we want them to do right so it's not only about just like I said trading or just like you know do some kind of purchase some nft it has to be more utility and for what we are doing right so we connect the real world data and the devices into the web series so we see a lot of use cases including sustainable you know like sustainable energy including like you know how to connect your your vehicle data into the web3 and do the monetization and you can be part of the uh you know users to to do the contribution and earn the you know kind of the incentives all type of of the more tangible utility will bring the adoption yeah I would agree with a lot of what you said especially hitting on the utility aspect I think in the the good thing about the bear Market is everybody is focused and forced to focus on actual utility um and I think that's kind of what we're seeing in gaming it's just easy to explain to web 2 users and obviously vitalik has spoken about this for a very long time about being able to take assets from game to game and that's just the easiest use case to explain to folks but I think where we need to focus on is making ux UI improved we're actually seeing I think one of the few successes of onboarding large groups of web2 users was so rare so I think that kind of showed that you can gamify experiences and actually they're one of the few kind of growing Mau even throughout the bear market so that is probably my favorite use case of actually providing both fun ux UI most folks don't even know that it's kind of on chain I think that may be kind of the magic magic move while we're onboarding a lot more users yeah I'd love to I think a lot of what you said uh completely makes sense and I think abstracting away the sort of wallet layer uh using sort of a multi-factor authentication using like your phone number and your email instead of having uh someone manage a bunch of words would go a long way as well uh I think sort of overcoming the security and UI ux issues with using uh wallets as well I think is the major uh sort of Roadblock uh I think account abstraction NPC wallets uh those are really good steps in towards engaging sort of uh the solutions that we need yeah so um you know this problem has been discussed like a long time ago three or four years ago right um we are talking about like a scalability of the blockchain and the usability and also interchange operability so it looks like all this problem has been well uh well dealed with and we now see like uh blockchain has been accessed can process like thousands of transactions per second and also we do see like transaction fees got reduced a lot so I feel like the next phase will be uh as I uh all those um panelists said right we try to increase the usability and you know I'm going to do I'm I'm seeing like more and more applications on the developers to design more data incentive data you know intensive applications on top of blockchain so that's what Auto we are going to focus on in the next next stage absolutely absolutely uh this leads to the next question um there are many significant improvements over web 2 that web3 Technologies like dapps and D5 bring such as greater security privacy and the right to transact how does web3 communicate these advantages to when the hearts and minds of web2 users that would otherwise not care about the space I think uh for for sort of the crowd we're in uh mostly America given that we have such good institutions and such good sort of financial tooling it's pretty hard to sell it I think uh I'm quite confident uh sort of Latin America will be sort of one of the biggest springboards towards adopting sort of the the tooling that we're building given that they just have very shitty currencies there's an intrinsic need for uh protecting economic uh Power so I think uh it'd be a little hard to sort of remove credit cards as a daily use usage in America but I think uh other sort of uh non-developed countries will have the highest adoption rate uh in terms of a quick adoption agreed and I think focusing on a narrative is important we can kind of say like okay we're all here we all kind of understand the pros but we can't kind of turn our attention away from EMS and latam especially is huge and I think we focus Hugh that would be the best way is just to explain to folks in the U.S okay we understand that maybe it won't work for us and we're placing things but focus on hyperinflationary economies and just using narrative to actually drive the story because if you need to focus on narrative and actual Financial inclusion and I used to work in traditional finance and a lot of what they do is redundant and D5 helps and I think you can kind of more attack that within the US is some of the redundancies on Wall Street that D5 can really replace that show perspective in a way we actually launched a kind of privacy first you know camera back in 2018 because we see you know privacy and security is the best benefits you know Webster can bring to the web tool or the normal people but you know from our statistics and Survey the result actually will be priced people don't really buying for privacy and security they take this as a kind of additional benefits so they want it but actually what really gets them in are something else that's why just like you know C cannot sacrifice with you know for example the convenience or just like the utility what the surface they are really buying for they're not buying for you know kind of they don't buy the Privacy they're very they're buying for something else for example they're buying for the service they're buying for maybe just like certain kind of you know uh products right but they won't kind of just like have the underlying uh you know a secure security and privacy as a benefit so that's why just like right now the problem for the website company like they say Hey you know this is our value proposition our very proposition we will provide you the Privacy we'll provide you the security and then this is good but this is kind of embedded into your service I think just like for the web Street company more importantly is focusing on your own use case and the real utility which you know the real world peoples everyday people they understand and they want to use you know for daily basis that part will be the most important right now and then just like take those you know privacy security or other benefits like the data ownership all the things as underlying so which is additional under the benefit always said um so um yeah so we do see that a lot of benefits of web3 over web 2 but also there are lots of users web to users they uh they don't want to jump out of their comfort zones and uh you know starts to uh they're always reluctant to use the web 3 products I have talking to a lot of my friends say hey that Google Map is collecting your like travel data every day and you know they are consuming your data and they're monetized by themselves monetize your data right my friend said I don't care as long as I you know Google can help us to improve the user experience I you know I can contribute my data to them so so I feel um you know to do that do we have to do like a gradually right we we should not like build like an app like uh include all the web 3 features immediately make make those people like a sudden shift we have to like put like uh web3 features like one by one and you know um try to not desalinate just alienate uh those users that who doesn't require zero zero knowledge on web3 and the cryptocurrency and um you know also we have to um build like a strong Community for every web3 project so that you know try to make the um make all the decisions that web through like more transparent and as to ask users feedback from the product so that all the users they're going to be part of the product design and they they're going to appreciate the web 3 uh features in the product also um you know the partnership with web 2 companies we do see like um like Nike and Starbucks they start to start to use the web3 Technologies right so partnership with with the web two companies is going to be have uh to make that like the web through technology that's a large user base like a penetration to the to the web to web to users so that can they can appreciate all the benefits of web3 like privacy and security definitely definitely crypto is all about driving narratives and with these narratives we really have to communicate it uh with that said how do we effectively onboard web 2 users into web3 yeah just like you know I think a lot of us you know we mentioned about you know it's a it's more about focusing on the use cases focusing on the utility part and just like you know maybe following on you know we are also working with a lot of web 2 company so I I think just like based on our experience the BD process will be so different from how we onboarding the Webster developer which is more like a lot of the workshop and talk about the advantage of your technology scalability you know ZK all those technology right but the web 2 companies are not buying that so for germs they are more care the reason why they get into the web three the reason why they do the nft for example we're talking to uh you know companies like Nike and Adidas right so see I'm more care okay so this is the solution this is a kind of nft program which will be going to increase our their user engagement so that's the reason or it can attract more users get into their store like you know the Starbucks nft points program so that's kind of basically uh the first point you know when they listen to your page like say okay so you are providing this solution okay then how you can help them to increase their user engagement if it can work and then they can open this opportunity to integrate with your solution they don't really care about which chain they don't really care about the kind of which technology they care about the Simplicity of the user experience and how just like and they also care about the the tangible solutions they provide to users I think just like from the big Brands right they really understand about the needs from their user side so that's the that's a their advantage right so how we can adopt this mentality and change our kind of you know or adjust our BD approach or partnership approach to work with them you know in a way they can understand that's very important so that they can open their hundreds million user base to the Webster no uh fundamentally I think we just need to build uh better products uh web 2 experiences with web 3 back ends um I'm sure like everyone here uses metamask and we've all seen that you switch to the wallet and you see this diamond for like 30 seconds and you think something broke but and then suddenly it works uh those types of experiences have to completely be optimized uh until like I the wallet situation is one of the biggest and I think even um there at some point I even think we might not even call it wallets anymore we might call them profiles because it's essentially a backpack that holds your identity holds much more than just money your on-chain activities um so fundamentally I just think we need to build Superior Products to web 2. I agree and I think identity might be one of the best use cases because people are already comfortable with signing in with Google signing in with your various social profiles so if you can just create something that's super user friendly and it focuses on privacy and they have the same UI ux people are going to go towards something okay if it's not changing user behavior and it's a drop down box and you can just take your identity with you in a identity backpack of sorts I think that's the best use case because you need to kind of require web 2 users to have a very low barrier to entry you can't expect I think the large portion of them to kind of use the interfaces that most of us here do and be comfortable with that so it's about creating those experiences and for the business side especially companies that are just focused on retention or shareholder value they don't want something that users are going to be annoyed with and it's going to cause a disruption or social media backlash so it's about ease of use so I think that's kind of the biggest Focus something that web 2 users are just used to already in a way but just with web3 yeah I agree so user experience user experience the user experience is a key so actually user doesn't care about the web to a web 3 right so they only care about care about the user experience so um you know when the web 3 feature is integrated into a product it has to be seamlessly so a user has a user has a workflow right like for for example the wallet they use usually like a user user username and password to log into like account so now suddenly we change to like a mnemonics and then you have to record write down all the other private keys so no no like not have I don't think many users are going to use this product so um uh yeah but better user experience and to integrate the product like web3 features seamlessly into the product I think this is key to the to the white deployment agreed as an industry we really have to lower the friction um for entry and make it really seamless for the next users we've seen massive Brands enter web 3 such as Nike with the acquisition of Arctic artifact garnering 186 million in revenue from it last year and Starbucks tying nfts to their loyalty program are these brand Integrations and Partnerships benefiting web 3 as a whole or the individual Brands more I think you can take it both ways I would point to so rare as the example again is just something that most web 2 users don't even realize it's web3 and yet they sign Partnerships with EPL every pretty major sports league in the world because they realize they can drive more Revenue you can give fans new experiences but for the Starbucks side I think it just benefits probably I wouldn't say most people understand what the partnership with polygon has done either for users using the app or even from the polygon side so I would say there's been a mixed bag of Partnerships working for one the other and then some with neither and their use cases haven't really been proven out but I think continuing to forge those relationships we're only going to kind of see through trial and error what users actually care about and want so I think the Nike one really works it makes sense that folks want to be able to purchase um I mean you even look at in Virtual Worlds like Roblox people care about purchasing skin so it makes sense that Nike would kind of expand there but I think the Starbucks one kind of less certain on who that actually benefits at this time at least anything that happens on chain I love it so the more on chain stuff the better yeah so I feel those kind of a collaboration like it can benefit in both parts so for Nike and the Starbucks you know they generate extra revenues from setting up digital assets and they you know use nft to to do the build their loyalty program to to help the user engagement and also it's very helpful to the for them to enhance their brand image they build them try to be like Forward Thinking and Innovative right so in terms of web3 society you know get a collaboration with those big names in web 2 it help them to penetrate their uh you know Technologies to to more users and it also proves that that the web 3 has the real use case in the web tool right so it's it's going to be attract like more investors and more innovators to in the space so that it can help the web 3 community in a hole actually there are two parts one is exposure the second is the conversion so definitely you know the web 2 company uh you know the adoption of the nft right specifically drive a lot of exposure from the web to company when you use right now when you you know ask a question to normal people because of Starbucks you know nft a lot of people they start to look at okay what's that right so you know my and my membership you know can be turned to be the nft but when you look at the current statistic the conversion is not that ideal it's kind of just a less than one percent of the you know kind of nft users they really can convert to be a kind of web3 uh you know uh users so that's why just like the usability the Simplicity of the uh kind of the web you know kind of the wallet you know experience that's very important but I think just like when you even look at this one percent of the conversion right what drives them to pick become a kind of web3 it's really about the ownership of the digital asset I think that part is really important when people feel okay this really see these nfts their own asset they want to do the trading or exchange or certain kind of utility like staking right they start to learn how to convert you know their kind of hosted art wallet into a kind of real wallet how to convert the asset from one you know wallet to another wallet or maybe into some kind of marketplace I think that part we we need more kind of you know education or you know learning you know know kind of the more education you know for the normal users how they do that it's really complicated right now so that the conversion is really hard so I think just like you know definitely it's beneficial to drive you know those web to users leverage on the uh web 2 brand but you know from the web series side especially just say normally those projects they are leveraged on a third-party uh solution Webster resolution lab to do that but how we can so this layer of the surface partner they can do better to convert more users from web to to Webster so that's a big question we need address absolutely uh to follow up what can we learn from web 2.5 brands on bridge in the Gap to web3 okay I can so yeah so uh the web 2.5 company they really focused on first user experience right so so that's what uh web3 company also you know when you start a web 3 project you have to think about like what's the user experience experience so uh web 2.

5 is they compromise a lot of on the on the centralization decentralization of uh like a lot of things right to try to have a bad user experience so um second is is the community so web 2 actually web to other web 2 projects has built like a community on their products so web3 can also leverage on that on the products and try to build the same kind of community to engage with the with the clients and um web 2.5 um also um you know they have built like a very very uh customer kind of a customer engagement like a a user feedback kind of channel so that they have customer service and and all the um all other products you know the the channel to communicate with the with the with their clients is very very um very good so I feel like uh web3 projects it's web 3 is fully decentralized we use Discord and uh and uh for decentralized communication but sometimes it's kind of uh you know not not that efficient maybe we can use that to uh you know the same thing like a web web 2.5 is working on to try to you know to help us to improve our products I think web 2.5 is kind of where we're at I think for the most part you mentioned metamask I think nothing really passes the mom test quite yet and that's just kind of the rule of thumb for most web 2 things how easy is it for people to use so I think it's kind of a reminder of how much further we have to go and if web3 projects can really take what works um from web2 which is community and usability then you can actually grow uh retention rates for a lot of web 3 projects so I think it's taking kind of the best of web 2 and then disregarding just the um kind of things we all hate especially the Privacy aspect definitely how can web3 establish its presence in a web 2 dominated world we need a killer app there are people in yeah definitely I think just like uh I think in the past kind of you know I have been in this industry since 2014. in the past kind of eight to nine years uh our website developer doing a really good job to kind of building up you know the infrastructure layer by layer so now we are already kind of have a good foundation we have the good little one we have more than you know we need we have the good scalability and ZK you know technology we have some kind of really good you know middle layer you know uh like message layer like you know all type of the kind of middle layer modules right but I think just like we need more uh developers they are really focusing on the app use cases so there are no more only think about okay so okay my my advantage is about you know technical Advantage but more think about just like how we can benefit uh everyday people's everyday life right so those type of kind of application is much needed only the killer app can kind of really bring people in and then people will stay not just like they come in and do certain things and then they're nothing they can really kind of sustainably use and then live yeah so it's all about the application side yeah 100 agree I think uh we are missing our killer app I think one um Theory I have sort of is that given that now there's this new um sort of social unit what people call us Dows I think uh I think the Creator economy will eventually evolve into what I call the cooperation economy uh the Creator economy model essentially focuses on one person uh providing value and it's a parasocial relationship I think now that you have uh monetary value that you can incentivize and distribute amongst multiple actors uh I think that will essentially probably enable a new social phenomenon that might enable a super uh like a super adaptive form from that angle of a like a social dab like that I like that yeah so um you know try to enter the web to space is always difficult so um I would say when I talk to now I try to I try to explain web3 to my web to use this but now when I talk into web to users I try to use like a lemon language instead of using like technical jargons like so try to focus on the real benefits and what problem can web3 solve instead of talking about speaking of Buzzy words like decentralization whatever that doesn't work okay so um another thing is I think in the future I hope like in the future as Jin said we are going to have killer applications but in my mind I what I imagine is in future there's big web 3 names they're going to have like uh like an Apple store in Times Square so that you know people can get into the store and they really show the demo of the of the of the web 3 products to them right that's and that at that time the web 3 Paradise can really go to the daily life while the pro of the of the people absolutely before we wrap up what socials can we find you on what's the question uh what social media can we find you on you can find me at Twitter my handle is my name and also I'll be here all kind of all week so just catch me and we can exchange telegrams like I said early stage event investor so if any of you guys uh want to chat more hit me up uh you can find me on Twitter magic of ozzyazi yeah Twitter LinkedIn telegram everything so I'm happy to talk everybody offline so I I get lots of time here today so yeah for me I actually follow our in official account in the Twitter account I'll text iotx IO and also we will host a very big event real world event on March 3rd uh you know which which is R3 Al world so this is the first Showcase of shows you know uh real world applications we invited kind of over 20 real world applications and you know projects Hardware related you know deep in sectors in real world asset sectors they will be here to Showcase just like a mini CES type of the website version so I think just like you know welcome to check out our event on March 3rd at you know upper Larimer so we have the event information on Twitter as well if you follow us you can see welcome everyone and I'm also will be here if you have any questions feel free to talk to us thank you and you can catch me at kasim Ward on Twitter and Linkedin thank you for tuning in thank you thank you