15062026 CHAPEL VANINA IVANOVA

Thank you to Vanina. Okay.

[snorts]

She will talk about is chicken when we forget to build user-centric dapps. Okay.

I can explain the blockchain to a 5-year-old, but I cannot run my own slides.

[laughter]

Okay. Thank you. I feel very important like I'm delivering um an academic paper which this is not. Um Hi, I'm Bonina. I come from Bulgaria and um I've been doing crypto marketing for 10 years now which feels like an eternity but on the grand scheme of things it's not that long.

I have worked with multiple multiple different projects and multiple different product teams. And you'll see in a minute why that's important. Um I am myself a crypto native person and I use different applications decentralized, non-decentralized and I have a very critical point of view. I like to point out things that are wrong with something and things that are not good in terms of UX and and experience. I am currently building the Sol Sisters community which is a community for women building and existing within the Solana ecosystem.

So if that's something that you're interested in, reach out to me. I would love to tell you more about that. And I'm also the aunt of Max who is currently a four and a half year old boy. Uh I just got a a video from from him this morning saying, "Look how strong I am." And I thought, "Damn, that kid does not lack confidence."

This is Max when he was um I think he's one and a half in this picture. His mother was taking him to a park and they saw those gorgeous peacocks. And my sister, his mom, took a pause to enjoy the birds. She pointed them out to Max and she was like, "Look, Max, peacocks. Look at how beautiful they are."

Max just stood there being the critical little one that he is and said, "Is chicken." And I found that phrase hilarious, not just because of the bad bad construction, but also because to me that phrase, "Is chicken," while looking at gorgeous peacocks, encapsulates the way we have been building in crypto for the past decade. We build peacocks, users want chicken. And that's why the name of my presentation was so weird. We are currently stuck in a tech-first loop.

And why we do that? Because the technology is so new and crypto has gathered so many of the smart people in the world. Some of them have gone to AI now, but you know, we still have the majority of the smart asses in in crypto. And that technology, even though it has been a full decade of actively building on Ethereum and different ecosystems after that, 10 years on the grand scheme of things is not a long time. So, that's a pretty new technology.

And what happens is we have all of those developers and engineers and UX people and marketers on the playground with those brand new toys. And instead of looking at the market the way entrepreneurs do or the way startups do, we look at the technology. We think, "What can we do with this tech? Haha, let's see." And we don't build real use products.

We build proofs of proofs of concept. And then we end up in the situation where we're like, "Oh, we're going to build it and they're going to come." But will they? My experience shows not always. Actually, most of the times, mhm.

So, being stuck in this loop, we build features that are fun to build. Features that are interesting. We are digging deep to find use cases that were not were not able to create until now. But nobody really asked for those features. We skip the market validation part, and that's incredibly important.

And we build for edge cases and not for the core value. This is also caused because of the fact that we have a relatively easy access to funding. I still remember the ICO era, the note sales era, and now even with VCs, it's relatively easy to to raise if you're building a crypto, an AI, or even better, a crypto AI product. Um so, we are not pressed by the short runway. We're not pressed by time and oh my god, we're running out of money, how are we going to pay salaries next month?

So, that gives us the luxury of exploring things that are peacocks. Founders are technical usually. The majority of them are technical, very young. They don't have that corporate experience or startup experience, not necessarily. And then there's crypto Twitter where every everything happens in crypto still to this day.

Crypto Twitter is the the holy bible of of networking. And that's um an echo chamber very often. So, you build something that is stupid, the market doesn't want it, the market doesn't need it. You post it on crypto Twitter and you get like a thousand comments from other engineers where like, "Oh my god, this is so cool. How did you think of building that?"

And then you get the impression that yeah, this is something cool that I really did. It's useful. Let's kill keep building it. And that also leads us to chasing the wrong metrics. We go after total value lock, T transactions per second, like all those different metrics that yeah, they are metrics and they look impressive on a slide.

But do they really matter? So, we end up in a in a situation where we build a fully modular ZK-enabled roll-up aware layer 2.5 protocol recursive staking so about reputation. We deploy it on the toaster at home. It I don't know.

It's it's amazing, but how do you monetize it? How do you turn that into an actual real business? And then to measure that amazing tech that we just shipped, we go to Discord and we're like, "Oh, we've got 50,000 people on Discord. We've got a bajillion Twitter followers. We have TVL.

We have this many wallet connects." How many of those Discord servers are actually active and haven't muted your server? How many of your Twitter follower followers are engaging with your content and helping spread it? What is that TVL What does this TVL represent? What are the actions taken after those wallet connects?

Do people just connect their wallets to see what your product looks like or they actually use it? Again, food for thought. What we should be doing instead is going to 10 of our friends in the industry or 10 random people on Twitter, asking them about what they want, what they need, what are their what are their pain points, how they function in this world of crypto. And then, use the metrics that actually give us useful information about the viability of a business. What's the retention rate?

How many action completes we see within our DApp? What is the repeat usage? What is the average life cycle of a user? What is the qualitative what are the quality that users are seeing in our product? I've tried to boil down to five principles.

I don't want to make it overcomplicated like we do with our products. So, um boil it down to five principles for you for building user-centric apps in crypto. And the first one is, talk to the users. Honestly, not rocket science. It seems so simple when you say it on the slide.

And when you look at the business, there are so few companies that talk to their users before they launch something. Ask yourself these five questions. Who is my user? What is their problem? How are we going to solve that problem for them?

Why would they come to us and not somebody else? And what does success look like for the user, not for me as a builder, but for the user. And if you can't have if you don't have good answers for those those questions, maybe you should go in a different line of business. I don't know. Just saying.

Prototype matters more than protocol. Instead of starting with how do we put that on chain, start with how does this look off chain? And then, we design the UX, we design the flow, we figure out the user journey, and we build the system around that, not vice versa. And honestly, I have seen that time and time and time again again, especially in the ICO era, where people were trying to build on the blockchain for the sake of building on the blockchain and being able to raise money. I get it.

That was a kind of like a low-hanging fruit, an easy way for people to raise. But, that's how we ended where we are today. Okay. Uh sorry. The next rule, measure signals, real signals, not the likes from the other engineers on Twitter.

Look at your retention. Look at your action completes. I've said that and I'll keep saying it over and over again, because it's incredibly important. Look at what's your time to value. If you have 10 engaged users who are actually able to give you valuable feedback, and they come to your product back and back and back, that is way more important than having a thousand users who connect their wallet once, look around for a second, and never come back.

Oh, this is the biggest pain of my life, being a marketer. I'm not a builder, I'm a marketer. Um you have no idea how many product teams I have worked with where I have been presented proudly presented a feature, uh and I've been told, "Hey, we built this, now you have to market it." And I look at the feature and I'm like, "That's an amazing feature. Nobody really wants it, though.

Why should I How How do I market it, and why should I market it?" So, that's a mistake that, unfortunately, a lot of projects make, and if I can be an advocate for like one thing, if you can take one thing out of this presentation, it should be this. Loop your marketing in. Get them in the room from the very beginning. Ask them to collect feedback for you because the marketing people are the people who have the touch point with the potential client.

Ask them to talk to those users. Ask them to help you design surveys. To design UX research. Get them involved from the very beginning. And don't be mad at them when they tell you, "Hey, we can't really sell this feature because there's no money in it."

And the fifth rule, make it stupid simple. And then make it pretty and beautiful. Kind of like I did with those slides. I made them stupid simple and then added some pictures. Users don't care about your complicated tech.

They don't want to know what's happening under the hood. When you go to the bank and you want to send somebody money, do you ask the bank teller, "How does this work? What's the routing? What other banks are you using in this process?" No, you just want to know that the money that you're sending is going to be received by the person that you're sending them to.

If you want to make a phone call, do you go and research how mobile networks work and like what's the difference between 3G and 4G and 5G? No. You just want to pick up the phone and make a phone call. You don't care about the features. You care as a user, as a client, as somebody paying for something, you care about the benefit.

How does this service or product make my life better? Instead of me having to train a pigeon to send a message across the country, I can make a phone call. That's what I care about. And if you can't onboard your users quickly and easily and you can't sell them the benefits right away, again, maybe consider a different career. I've heard that tomato farming is very, very rewarding.

In conclusion, build less, validate more. Or if you want to build more, build more, but validate even more. So, that's what I have for you today. If you want to connect with me, this is the QR of my Twitter. We can connect on Twitter.

If you don't use that, um come find me. I'll be here all day. I have other apps for communications as well. Thank you so much. You have been a fantastic audience.

Thank you. Thank you, Vanina, for your presentation. Beautiful and very interesting. Thank you. Uh do you have any question?