Getting to a Million DApp Users by Siddharth Coelho-Prabhu (Devcon4)

my name is Syd I'm the product Li that coinbase wallet and you know today I want to talk to you guys about the apps right and specifically what is dappered option looked like and what can we do to get to where we are today and to a new world where there's millions of users using the apps so let's just kick off with that right like decentralized apps like here we are the biggest developer conference for what might be the most promising smart contract platform in history and we all think that I think we all believe that the apps are the future of how consumers will experience crypto right it's a it's a packaged product where people can go in and do something that has that's that's based on crypto and so we all share this excitement right if you look at this chart I think some of you may have seen this before but the numbers and the adoption has been staggering the the shirin amount of building that's been happening right we're almost 20,000 eath related github repos and that's that's amazing that kind of adoption curve does not happen very often and it's the same story with gaps right we've steadily seen the number of gaps increasing quarter-on-quarter just been like steady growth and from all of our conversations in the ecosystem it's clear that this piece is not gonna is only going to improve from here and this turns more DAPs in the pipeline that are about to get launched but when you look at actual adoption and traction right like the number of users using crypto that hasn't really taken off and so you know that's 13,000 users is about what you would get from like a second tier app in the App Store right it's not across the entire ecosystem and it's the same story with each transaction volumes right like daily daffy volumes are are tiny and so what's going on right this is not this is not good at all like what's what's happening like on the one hand you have an amazing amount of innovation creativity building happening this worldwide movement but users aren't biting and so what's going wrong what can we do better and to get out of this situation so before we before we dig in there though like why do I care right like what's the what's the story and I've been spending the last year working on this product coinbase wallet some of you may know it as toshi and for those who don't know it it's a it's an app in the App Store and the place tours available - and you want to download and we are a user controlled crypto wallet we support all the etherium digital assets so ERC 20 tokens GRC 721 collectibles we're also def browser and so we create a bunch of gaps and we'll support any web 3d objects based app and so it's a really you know easy form factor and popular around the world to be able to used apps on mobile we were the first mobile app browser where we we featured crypto keys back when they launched in December we were also the first popular wallet to support collectibles and so obviously crypto keys was the first and there's been you know hundreds more to come after that and at this point we feature around 87 apps and it's really a cross-section of everything that's happening in the ecosystem so there's all the financial services you have decentralized exchanges you have investment platforms borrowing platforms then you have all of the games and collectibles all of that entire kind of subspace then you have decentralized social media decentralized market places and even jobs platforms where you can do stuff and unencrypt oh so pretty pretty quite a quite a lot of activity going on and we try and curate the best apps and present them to our users so that they can a find it find them easier find what's what's hot what's popular what's useful and then also we have some guardrails so you know if you're new to crypto we explain what gaps are what ethers and so really like the the target audience is is people that are relatively new and and relatively like inexperienced in crypto so why did we even built go and base wallet I think the the idea for us has been that you probably know coin based because of our first products right the brokerage and the exchange and those were successful in onboarding millions of users into the investment phase of cryptocurrency and the investment phase is really people buying crypto because it appreciates in value but I think what we're all excited about most excited about is the actual utility phase where people start to use crypto and that's where coin based wallet comes in and it's the first of several products that we've launched in this space and so we present this product coin being the gateway to the decentralized web where you can access all of these tabs and so over the last year we've just had this option engage with all the developers in the space getting all of you guys get to know what you're building try and create a platform to make the app successful and give them a stage to all of our users and you know we also have the full spectrum of users right we have some very early adopters and then we have like complete crypto nerds like you know like a lot of us in the in the audience and that gives us the kind of feedback which is you know much more kind of a lot more granular and like you know reactions of what people are like feel like when they first experience crypto and so reflecting on all of these kind of exchanges both with developers with and people building gaps as well as early adopters of end users of crypto right we've we've come up with the list of the three things that we think are the most important kind of hurdles to adoption and so what's holding back the adoption is basically the first is use case right and I think it's the most fundamental problem that we have is like what problem are these products and these gaps actually solving the second is assuming that you know they're solving a good problem how usable other products and the third is you know are these products actually able to support many millions of users at scale and so this is roughly ordered in in what we think is the importance right like first you have to be solving an important problem second is of course then comes usability and then comes scalability so let's tackle number one so we we were given with ethers created we were given this amazing tool right a turing-complete programming language operating on top of a decentralized borderless trustless platform right just something that we never had before and for the first time we had the concept of digitally native programmable value and I think all of us agree that this building block is as powerful as the internet was when it first came along thirty years ago right incredibly powerful lots of promise and what have we built with it so far well mostly digital cats right and so and I'm being facetious obviously because I just showed you like a bunch of different apps solving a bunch of different use cases but really when I go outside of our crypto community and you know I talk to people and they like Hey what what's the most popular tap-in and it's hard to keep a straight face when you tell them or well it's been these like digital cats that you can buy and and so the problem is that no one has yet built apps that really solve user problems that let you know that that people feel a lot of pain around and so no there isn't an app out there where people wake up every morning and they're like in this hundreds of thousands of people that say I really need this tap I need I need to use it right oh if the tap in to exist that it would leave a vacuum in their lives and so so you know that's that's a bit of a hurdle but maybe that's okay for the first generation right so we're increasingly seeing the first generation of the apps as being kind of primitives these were you know we were given a new technology a few years ago and we build proofs of concept right these are the things that you can do when you're given a smart contract platform right you can create fungible tokens you can create non-functional tokens you can create identity on the blockchain you can write smart contracts that enable trustless transfer you can enable you can create smart contracts that allow you to deposit assets and then withdraw them withdraw collateral against those those assets that you've deposited you can create stable stable coins you can create state channels so these are all proofs of concept of the things that we can do but I think what needs to happen next is the next generation of taps and so you know Sam Altman of YC once said write like make something that people want and this has now become something of a mantra for like the startup factory that's YC and it is because this this idea works right the the next set of gaps we need to change our mindset from developers that are kind of exploring and playing with this technology to entrepreneurs that are trying to build businesses and solve real problems and the good news is that there's a playbook for this right there's an established playbook for this you you find problems that people really need to solve you build a product around it you talk to your users non-stop and iterate and improve the product you figure out how you're measuring traction and hold yourself accountable to that and then you have a strategic plan for how you're going to grow that business and these are the these are what we feel needs to happen next so the the next apps will answer these questions right so what problems are we solving for users what about crypto uniquely enables us to solve these problems for the first time that we solved before and then are these products that are building are they gonna be ten times better than anything else that exists today and another thing to keep in mind is that we may find that we actually have to leave our comfort zones and so you know traditionally when you build a tech product the early adopters were in Silicon Valley and it radiated out from there but maybe you know where we need to go is kind of outside of this and go to places where people aren't being served by today's financial system and so that's not normal but maybe that's the that's an anomaly that's where we have to go to find users and find adoption next if you're trying to pitch your app try and do it without using the word script or blockchain right it's not easy right because for for a lot of us what's what's cool about our app is it's using crypto blockchain but normal people don't really care about this so so so this is another challenge when you go out and try and build a product for people and you've got to keep in mind that game-changing innovations they the eventually rule and they'd eventually take over but it takes time so obviously when the when the Muraki was first created it took I think 23 years for us to actually embrace it and move away from horse-drawn buggies and similarly when the internet was first created 30 years ago right there was this whole generation of entrepreneurs that immediately kind of thought of all of the new ideas that were going to come they thought of everything that you could possibly do with the Internet and they built the first prototypes and they raised a lot of money and we saw the dot-com boom and most of them ended up crashing because it was right idea wrong time just too early and some of course survived right and so some of the biggest companies if they like Amazon and Google started then and survived so what we have to keep in mind is when you look at the taps piece today there's a lot of that too right we have a lot of like ideas that are like amazing really game-changing ideas but is it too early for some of them probably and so we have to figure out what are the ideas that will actually get traction in today's market and so so that's about you know finding the right use case and finding the right problems to solve would we look at the taps that we have today there are some teams that are super strong right like we've we've even invested in some of them at corn-based Ventures they have strong entrepreneurial teams they're talking to users trying to solve real problems trying to fix scalability issues but when we talk to them they say that the number one issue that they're having is actually usability and you know so that's I think the neck thing that that we want to talk about is what's the state of usability and how can we help improve that so I think we all agree that the the state of like DAPs to the end using - today is pretty awful right so just to get started you have to first install a wallet app or a browser extension then you have to kind of write down this 12 what recovery phrase which people completely it's a new concept for most people and it's a complete pain in the ass then you've got to go to cryptography at exchange or fear - crypto exchange and by crypto then you've got a copy and paste your wallet address over to the exchange and send the money across then you wait for 5 or 10 minutes the money shows up you go to you go to kick off your transaction you see gas prices and you're like if you're new you're like what the hell is a gas price and you know then you come to terms of that you you enter the transaction wait a few more minutes the UI updates and finally it's like mission accomplished and that's pretty painful and you know I think most of us here in the room today we have this dream that we want to we want to like we want to replace we have this new technology that can build an open financial system and we want to replace like the entrenched interest of Wall Street right but here's the problem the user experience today because of FinTech the user experience on traditional finance has become really really good and so you know there's and both the user experience and the distribution so you know there's a billion people around the world that have visas and mastercards and they can make electronic payments anywhere anytime with striped developers can start to accept crypto payments with just a couple of lines of code in 60 seconds I can send money to my family in India with transferwise basically overnight for like maybe 10 bucks right apps like venmo ali PA WeChat you can send money like sending a text message Google pay Apple pay make it really easy to just check out and so whether we like it or not we were trying to replace a system that is set a really high bar for usability and that's a lesson we learnt at coinbase pretty early right if you look at our website five years ago you look at our website today the the pitch remains the same we're like if you want to buy crypto we are the easiest place to do it the easiest and the most trustworthy place to do it and that works really well for us right there were dozens of other exchanges back then there are dozens of exchanges now and they're all offering the same basic thing of bank Krypto but we were able to differentiate ourselves by creating a good user experience and so that's something which you know we're now trying to bring the coin vs wallet and we're trying to bring that same ethos and over the next few months what you're gonna see is we're gonna try and make it really easy to fund your wallet we're gonna try and make it easier to use recovery phrases and manage that and actually not have to manage it at all if you can avoid it we're trying to break the boundaries of the DAP browser so we don't want it have to only open a daffy browser and use the apps you want you to be able to use them anywhere we want you to be able to send to friends and not like 40 digit addresses we want you to be able to discovered apps more easily and finally we want to also enable commerce we wanted to be really frictionless to be able to go and buy stuff on the internet with crypto so our goal is I showed you this chart before our goal is to drastically reduce the friction involved with onboarding we know that when daps builders create apps they do a lot of work to get people on onto their DAP and then they have to hand their their customer off to a wallet we take that responsibility pretty seriously and so we're trying to fix the experience and if you're that builder right there's this basically a design revolution that's been happening over the last six to twelve months and there's a ton of designers that event of the space they're sharing their knowledge and they're really they're helping us see whether were wallet builder or ad app builder they helping us see this space from just a different lens from the lens surfer of a beginner and you know we're all crypto nerds and we're so immersed in the in the mark of the technicalities but with good design we can really try and fix that so if you don't already follow these people you should write they're all awesome and they're bringing it down a fresh thought and energy into the space last option right like scalability last hurdle to adoptions now let's assume that you found a good problem to solve you're an entrepreneur you've you've decided you found a good problem to solve you've built a really good app around it you've you know use good design principles you've tested with your users and you're now an overnight success right you've you've cracked it you've got like tens of thousands of users you're like okay we've made it with the next crypto kiddies and then immediately this happens right and this is we know we know this will happen because it happened a few months ago right how it happened last year immediately the the network transaction load will Spyke fees will blow up the network will crap will crash and your app goes to hell right and we talked a lot of people outside of crypto that are looking in and like these could be game developers from big game studios they could be fin tech entrepreneurs that have had a success in traditional finance that are trying to launch something in crypto and their feedback is always like said if you tell me that my upper limit of users is like fifty or sixty thousand if I build on crypto that's not worth it for me it's a deal breaker I can't do it and so we I think that's a that's a really fair point right and so how do we fix the problem right and so I'm not going to go into the internal like the details of this you've you know there's enough talks you just heard from from Amin and Arjun but the options basically come down to this we either go with core scaling right and you know serenity is expected to show up but then it's not showing up for at least a year or two and so that's a long while to wait although it'll be a game changer or if it makes sense for your app if you're building a payments app or something that's between two parties state channels is a great approach right state channels and payment channels and so there's a few great projects there that you can experiment with but it's very early since you just once again you just heard from Ameen about the hack we're still you know this is what happens when we're learning right like you get hacked because you're learning we're still putting things together so it's too early to put any of these integer old production and then if it makes sense for your app there's also side chains so there's a bunch of science projects that you can look at a different approach and make sense if you need visibility to what's going on and so that's another thing to consider so quick recap of what we cover most important thing you can do if you're building a DAP solve a real problem talk to users figure out what what is an actual pain point and what like we've come up with what we can build now we need to figure out what we should build second is let's create a great usability and great experience around it and throw let's start experiment with these scalability options and I'm pretty convinced that if we tackle all three of these we're going to see some breakout successes in 2019 and I'm pretty stoked to see that so next stop moon thank you thanks questions specifically for mobile probably many people are aware that you had some trouble with Apple because they won through 30% cut and the App Store and this model has worked really well until a crypto hit so just wondering if you had some thoughts on how you think to avoid issues where Apple wants a cut or maybe Google in the future Amazon or whoever because it is a payment in their ecosystem at least from their perspective right yeah I think you know it's it's a little bit early days I think when before we begin to actually start to compete with these products with these like giants and so it's I think we're just gonna see how that plays out I think the equation will develop over time and relationships will develop over time I honestly don't have an easy answer to how you know how the community will navigate it and how the incumbents will navigate it it's just not clear at this point Thanks and then not totally related but still I think also UX what do you think about gas-free layers because then you're 12 steps there's still this gasps what the is gas and there's this new interesting concept that somebody else could pay gas for the user so that they at least initially don't have to deal with it do you have any thoughts on that yeah absolutely we love the idea of gas three layers of meta transactions frankly anything that reduces the the user burden and you know makes these transactions just disappear into the background it's a little bit early I think there's still they're basically being prototype as we speak right and so that's definitely something we're also looking at you know how to engage with it how to how to start deploy those but yeah it's a little bit early I was curious about you were also building a in web widget as well right what's the background on that right now sure so so we we had announced doing that and then we we had a bit of a rethink and we were like well what is if we actually want daps to be available everywhere do we just try and be on one more platform which is in web browsers or do we try and be on every platform so we're actively trying to figure out how to like what our place should be for web and hopefully we should have some announcements in the next month or two um also uh for gas have you thought about maybe changing the name of gas fee to just fee because it seems like from the last talk that people don't really care about in gas fees but if we just change the language there's fees with that help you know they I think it's an open question and something worth testing I think one of the issues is that when you're talking to new user when you tell them there's a fee they usually assume that you're taking the fee we're not taking the feet right like wallets don't take the fee and so I think if you if you make it clear that it's a gas fee and you try the concept back to what's going on on the blockchain and the miners and that's something we've tried to use helpful language inside the app but I think there's there's the danger that if you just say the word fee that people are gonna assume that it's our fee and be like oh you're charging too much well we're not right so yeah oh so people is for example now gone free for peeps is that a problem because you kind of don't want users to suddenly go back into that mindset of well look someone else is dealing with paying for all of this stuff isn't it and we're sacrificing that obviously for convenience is that the wrong sacrifice to make you want users to actually have a sense of control over what they're doing and remind them in a kind of educated way it's you who's in control yeah that's that's a great question I don't know if necessarily making people pay money is the best way to illustrate that they're in control but I get your point about the incentive system if someone else is paying for you and if something you know this if if the product is free then you are the product right and so there's a danger of that I think there's gonna be three or four different kinds of like business models that appear over crypto right you could see that one state channels appear and payment channels appear and are in production and and you know reliable that you won't have the problem of fees anymore as much and so maybe that problem goes away in in the next six months you mentioned a couple of times the reasons for success for apps to get mass adoption what I'm wondering is do you think that these same reasons apply automatically to adapts or where could there be differences we - in-depth and apps in in very strategic in you know - in very strategic terms to become successful so I think you know dab synapse from a user perspective of this dad should be the same thing that they don't care about whether it's based on a decentralized technology but it's really about can we leverage the fact that we have a programmable value and that it has without borders without permissions can we create a really powerful product there where you know traditional financial applications they have to kyc you you have to be in a certain geography you have to have permission to operate on their product crypto changes all of that so can you create programs that that make make use of that right I think that's that's where you can actually create a product where even the user doesn't know the using crypto it's suddenly much more powerful because it's available to more people and because it's more efficient with value so how much that we have left maybe does it say hey oh we have a minute okay very last question first thank you so much for emphasizing the need for use cases we need to actually have things that people need web versus native and enterprise what are what is your take on the priorities in those spaces sure so I'll comment on web versus native and not the enterprise because frankly I haven't paid any attention there whereas web versus native I've spent a lot of time thinking about that you know we started off as a native the incumbent was mayor of mass we started off as a as a native product I think I reflect back on what's happened with the internet today which is that half the activity on the internet for the long tail of activity is in web but for any product that is successful they eventually want to build their own native experience that controls the experience and because they native just is a richer format and a more powerful format for that and so once again we're actively trying to think about how can at the same time the problem with going completely native in creating native experiences in crypto is that if you created a wallet in each native experience you would be completely users will be completely fragmented where the identity would be fragmented across native different native apps the assets would be fragmented across definitive apps it would actually beat the value of crypto and if you know you actually had a different wallet in all of these different native apps and so we've actively been grappling with we already serve you know adapts are all on the web today we want to serve native clients we want to be a wallet for native products and so we're coming up with the strategy and a product offering for that you should see that in the next couple of months awesome give it up one more time for sale thank you [Applause] you