Is Mass Adoption Really the Measure of Success for Web3? | Candice Teo - Espoir PR / Crypto Comms

[Music] good afternoon everyone my name is Candace and today we're going to talk about whether Mass adoption is really the measure of success for web 3 so I'm currently a PR consultant um and I work mostly with infrastructure projects I've been in this space since 2017 I am also a core contributor to cryptocom Collective which is a group of web three and crypto PR and Communications professionals we're brought together to ensure continuous high standards of the work that we're doing in this space and also to build trust in this industry so to start off I asked the question all of you why are you here why are you here at this stage why are you here in Denver why are you here watching me from the live stream which I hope you are doing and why are you in web3 and why are you in crypto so I'll tell you why I'm here I stumbled onto this industry because I stumbled onto an open position and when I read about the company I read what blockchain is what DT is and what the company is using this technology for I said oh wow that's cool that's exciting I want to be involved and from that moment I told myself that I wanted to elicit the same kind of response at bit a little more enthusiastic than what I just showed you um to everyone that I talked to about the work I do and to about the projects that I work with so why is that important so that was a very simplified and very unpolished version of what I would say is vision and purpose my vision and my purpose and this is important because vision and purpose it drives actions it drives words it drives motiv ation and I have worked in I have worked for a really long time and in web 2 very corporate web 2 experience and in web Tre with uh leadership directly and it amazes me that a lot of them don't actually communicate their Vision what they want what they trying to achieve they'll tell me an idea they have or what they want to do and I always have to pull them back and ask them what are you trying to achieve by doing that what do you want and why are you doing it and a lot of them have to pause or think about it or come up with something on the Fly that I said does that tie back to your strategy it does it make sense and often times you know it's very nuanced in this industry because Vision can pivot Vision can purpose can pivot intentionally it can pivot reluctantly you know for a variety of reasons bad reasons good reasons maybe because there is some sort of pressure from the VCS or communities or you know internal team members and I think a very very big example of vision pivoting would be Google the founders Larry Page and Sergey bin initially had this vision of an open source public space a superior search engine right that actually makes information universally accessible and useful they were very much against an Advertising based business model because they felt that it would impact uh the well basically the integrity and the biasness of such results and it was it wasn't until um an early investor an advisor sounds familiar um realized the potential that user data can be used for profits and push for it that Google became the Google that we know of today and you know they achieved Mass adoption great right and I guess they're really successful right or wrong is that a success that you won maybe maybe not so from there today what I'm talking about isn't those people who you know know that they want Mass adoption because that's what they needed know that they want to turn a quick profit make a quick bu I'm talking about the builders who wanted to solve a real world challenge they wanted to build something or they want to build something for themselves for their family for their friends um you may be young and new all new new you could be old and new um and very optimistic or you could be experiencing we kind of like me but you're still holding on to hope you're holding on to hope that is tighter than you huddling your bags that's me and um you know I'm talking to the ones who kept on keeping on even during the bare market and you're still here in Denver you've gone to you know you've gone to the conference circuit and you've met the like-minded people and you've enjoyed it and you managed to shout out the noise that's uh irrelevant to you so um why this not working sorry W this not working yes great so when do we become obsessed with mass adoption um in my line of work I am constantly keeping up with the changing narratives what is hot what is not uh defi summer or you know whatsoever everything that comes up on Qui Twitter and you know I saw how we landed onto mainstream adoption Mass adoption remember everyone was talking about onboarding the next billion users on crypto Twitter on panels on stages like this and you know you kind of bought into it right that wave was just so infectious and interestingly I think that this tied in around the boo where there was a lot of VC money flowing in and everybody was in a rush with intense pressure to prove pmf to the VCS to prove that those VCS are going to have an extremely high Roi and you know what better way to say that you know they get a huge return by saying that your product will achiev Mass adoption you know that became the only metric that kind of mattered you know alongside your daus and your tvls so Mass adoption mainstream adoption is basically a widespread use among General public and it is actually viewed as a mainstream standard in our daily lives and MTH adoption is also a significant number of people that actively using your web tree applications your Crypton native applications you know this could be your Dex your wallets your uh content management platforms like mirror your decentralized credentials your decentralized storage like filecoin and codex um it is also the simless integration of Crypton native Tech into our daily tools uh this means that the user interaction does not need to actually understand crypto or web three is pretty much similar to people who are using the internet and have no idea what tcpip is I know that I don't really know as well um and also economies of scale right this is basic oneone economics which I had to study um when something has reached man Mass adoption mainstream adoption the product actually becomes affordable enough for everyone so that's a a very you know consumer product sort of um way to view things and this is how adoption in our industry currently looks like we have nfts we have Al defi you know you have your dexes you have your crypto bank cards wallets um mem coins in net investment products your atfs physical OTC so that actually exist in Hong Kong which just there have a consensus Hong Kong and you could see them you know popping up a few places here and there um Bitcoin ATMs so there are 40,000 Bitcoin ATMs around the world across 72 countries can you guess which is the country has the most number of ATMs exactly the United States with 32,000 ATMs Bitcoin ATMs here followed by Canada and Australia um so yeah and I am including regulation in adoption in the mass adoption of this industry landscape because regulation follows growth and when an industry becomes a fundamental part of an economy this is when the government realizes that it requires oversight so when regulation kicks in it means that we are being taken seriously and this is great right except that one thing in in common about everything is that it is financially motivated there is a financial relation to it there's a speculation and very speculative sort of aspect to it and it kind of depresses me or maybe not depress me well mainly because I work with a lot of really good infrastructure projects that doesn't have any direct link to this right and so where do you stand if you're not building a D5 protocol where do you stand if you're not trying to rock pool right and alongside this um image of our industry you have seen the issues that have cropped up and now we're talking about the hacks The Rock Poes you know the fraud and so on and so forth and that is how you know the normies or even the media actually view our industry and I need to qualify that all those problems and issues that's popped out is not a crypto problem it is traditional fraud it is traditional GR it is the traditional you know sense that you know comes along with social media that you need to be viral you need to do something you need the the attention in order to succeed and do you wonder you know if you fit in anywhere if your project would actually be on this page at some point in time maybe maybe not so you know the thing about defi is it was essentially to drive Financial Freedom and accessibility and now now I think this is quite far from where we actually want it to be so I'll tell you why Mass adoption can be misleading right because a lot of people could just be chasing it as a vanity metric as opposed to actually having true uh real value creation you know it is all about chasing users that actually you know are drawn in by the hype you know it's not about your utility you know and talking about those users the problem with these fair weather users are because they're here for speculative incentives right airdrops U farming they could be here for the zip line I don't know if anybody got that but anyway and these users actually you know they will leave when the incentives dry up and then they go from Project to project searching these incentives which means that all of you that chase these group of users are actually just dipping a toe into the same very murky user pool so they this growth does not actually contribute to the growth of this industry at all it's not real it's not true it is not sustainable it is not long-term uh success for you and at the end of the day right you don't actually solve real world problems or even first world problems you know and you know solving that is actually not a bad thing in my opinion so true adoption should be based on solving raal problems and contributing to the greater good of of the world and not just our industry so I want to talk about first principles because I am passionate about them and because I can and because it does matter so you know for those who don't know and those who know as well you know let's just look back to the past throw back and understand that uh crypto came from the cipher Punk era it's all about sovereignty it's about protecting privacy anonymity uh decentralized ation decentralization through cryptography right and um I read that day on crypto Twitter which I scroll a lot on obviously that people were saying crypto came out of the dark web and there is such a huge misconception and misalignment from what the actual truth is thankfully there were a lot of people who actually knew where crypto came from you know commented and replied and just you know kind of rectified that um misconception and um why why why is this important why does it matter because somewhere along the way we came from that into this huge meme coin and casino culture hey you know nothing wrong with that there is a place for everything I'm going to qualify that um but then this means that we've gone so far you know to the point that people are actually disinterested in building on this foundational principles or even caring about it even thinking about it well they've gone to the Other Extreme and somehow just exploited it and you know it it is a very clear indication of what the mes one because I'm a PR so and I work with lot infra projects so it means that uh it's a massive effort on my part to get the media to actually be interested in really really good infrastructure stories Milestones you know what the road map um the road map achievements what the impact to The Wider industry is you know they say they're interested but they say that the viewers may not be interested um I used to work for infrastructure privacy company and getting any sort of privacy related stories plays is even harder and they say no we love it we love it we want it everyone cares about privacy we care about privacy but we don't really know how to care about it so you know it's very hard to write about it nobody nobody cares nobody wants to read it and that's actually quite sad um in my opinion and look I think that uh there are people who also started out building with these foundational principles in mind and somewhere along the way they've had to Pivot uh project from VCS communities actually I guess uh put more pressure on on these projects than VCS and even internal team members you know people that hire in to scale the company and to drive growth somehow have a different Vision uh and somehow look at success differently so you know a lot of companies are forced to do that and I think the issue is that when you are chasing Mass adoption blindly there's a very high probability that you're going to stay away from not only just the foundational principles of crypto but your own original Vision like I said there is nothing wrong with mass adoption if it makes sense for your project there is nothing wrong if that is a success that you want but I'm talking about those who are searching more beyond that and you know really want to look at the value that they creating that's a place for everything so if not Mass adoption we have Niche adoption where a small but very knowledgeable and very engaged user base could actually create and give you more value than a very large and very disengaged and disinterested audience um you know we you I talk about you know solving specific complex problems for well defin communities what does that mean well basically if you are solving for a very specific issue you have a very specific user Target they can actually use your web 3 to more effectively and also give you the feedback that will help you you know improve your product and to help you scale and to help you prioritize the features that you should be prioritizing um for your vision and for your product and then you know you get the correct feedback you get a correct ask from the community and the industry and the users and then you could you could iterate the you know you could iterate many times and actually reach the Stellar iteration that is very close or even close and even hit um your original Vision so um I think that we need a fundamental shift to real value creation and utility um I landed in Denver last night and you know just scrolling crypto Twitter trying to get over the jetl going to bed and and it was really interesting for those who arried in the weekend there was a lot of chatter and talk about value and utility and how we need to start building for that it doesn't matter what you think of the conference uh here or there or in Asia anywhere I think what matters is the people that you meet and what you talk about and it seems to me that it's really high signal that everybody is desperately wanting to get back to focusing on building and creating the value and you know desperately wanting people to see that vision and not just speculating on what the markets are moving towards and I know last yesterday or this morning I don't know where in Denver so it's a different time zone I think this morning there was bit of a shake up to the market everybody was saying you're quite despondent I shut it out because I wanted to talk about this today and I think it worked because um it helped me focused and that's why it is right when you have a smaller effective Community it helps you focus on the right things it gives you a very clear direction of where you should be heading towards as you build and rebuild and rebuild and redraw your road map and publish it on Twitter and you know Brave out your D team of course so these are some of the other pieces of the success pzle I look I mean it's not prescriptive it is not even something that I say you have to consider I'm just giving you an example of how they are other measures uh to look at instead of mass adoption right you know we look at how effective are you at addressing a problem you know a problem that you care about a problem that maybe your family cares about uh impact on industry standards so I think that if you are doing really some if you're doing something that's really well on a very smallish industry or big or midsize industry and you manage to make an impact by changing certain things that you think doesn't work that's a very huge uh loud signal that actually you're doing something right um I want to talk about a little bit about Authority and reputation of users so for example um if you are say verifying scientific data Well Medical Data perhaps right and you know you have the research institutions that are your users and you know maybe some hospitals or you know other related stakeholders and there could just only be tens of thousands not many you know in the grand scheme of things in the world but if you have the really reputable research institutions that your users like maybe the Mayo Clinic I think that's very high signal as well that you are a successful project um and at the end of the day sustainable growth is something that I learned as a business uh degree holder and um and I think that that's what we effectively chasing right you think that mass adoption will allow you to have continuous users and therefore your project will continue to grow and be around the next 10 20 years so but the thing is this right um that's the beauty of our industry it's about free will it's about choices users one choices so again I said this is not prescriptive but it's time for you to think about what else you actually believe could be a measure of success for your project so what does that mean what's next I think you should chase people who are you who are your people and I think you need to be the people that you want to be with you know people that you work with people who use your product right and take the feedback from both the team and the user to then you know do better and to grow and to be successful you know and prioritize features that tie back to your strategy because that's never going to steer you away from your vision if you have to Pivot pivot but do it for a good reason not because you're trying to impress a VC not because crypto Twitter told you that that is the way to succeed and um expand outside of the usual and very obvious user pool I talked about you know fair weather users previously think a little bit about who you want to be using your product and I think that would put you in the right direction so at the end of the day ask yourself what does success look like to you I think it's time that all of you actually hear yourself think again and not what the industry is telling you success is or what you should do um I mean listen to talks like this and panels and take away what you need to take for and know what works well for you um and one last thing as well if you build it they won't come if you don't tell them about it so build for users that care about the same things that you do and then tell them why they should care about your product thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to seeing um more projects being talked about that actually creating real world value you