Building a better CryptoKitty — An end user vision for the Blockchain
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The age of the blockchain industry is relatively young in terms of years, and more importantly, leaps of technology and adoption. Reading about things like the DAO hack is, for many like studying a history book or hearing a campfire tale. It is certain that immutable wisdom can be gained by being present daily for events as they unfold, as in retrospect we generally just hear the summary version without, the reality of being an active player in the arena.
On the other side of the (bit?)coin, this race to “build the perfect blockchain” gives a highly technical perspective that people deeply entrenched will have to look outside their boats to find. For myself, I have chosen to look to the next logical in the evolution of the industry or — How will all this affect the end consumer? In my case, I am defining the “end consumer” not as the developer community or tools being built to build more tools as is often the case in the early evolution of an industry, but rather the hundreds of millions of “regular people” in developed economies and then expanded to the billions in the world.
The thesis is that Blockchain is here to stay in our world and its current inception can be likened to Morse code, compared to the modern day internet. That future is fantastic, but it is a generation+ away and can be discussed another day. The point of today’s discussion is how the current generation wakes to find Blockchain as part of their daily lives. In order to have insight into the future, we should take a moment to reflect upon the past.
Let’s rewind to Q4 2009 and an up and coming Social network named Facebook — my numbers may not exact here as I have seen different variants — but let’s say there were about 380m Active Monthly users of Facebook at that time. Let’s also move down the line to what I believe was one of the driving forces of Facebook really breaking into the mass market of the end consumer, namely Zynga. Yes that “evil” company that brought us Farmville. According to the numbers I could find, by the end 2009, Farmville had about 80m monthly active users on the Facebook Platform. Just let that sink in for a moment…
Readers who were active on Facebook back in the earlier days would have remembered the constant invites and built in virility in the Farmville platform, which in term gave users a reason to log into Facebook daily (to play Farmville). Equal if not more important, these same users were inviting their extended network to Facebook, theoretically for the social network aspect, but their initial push was to get more friends to help them farm better!
The point being that in the early days of a socially based ecosystem, there is the chicken/egg dilemma in which users are required, but if there is no ongoing UGC, (user generated content) then the users that come will also leave quickly. Causal gaming can and has proven to solve this issue.
Which brings us back to the star of this article tile, CryptoKitties. For those that are not familiar, — CryptoKitties had a splash run in late 2017 under the premise of collecting, breeding (and selling) unique “digital cats” on the Ethereum blockchain. The specifics of CryptoKitties is not terribly important; rather what is important is that for weeks after it launched, it deeply engaged the current userbase of Ethereum in a compelling gamification process. Had it not been for a few inherent limitations, this phenomena would have threatened to spill over into the mass market.
Bringing it all together, what is important here is that the collective industry has seen a global future for blockchain technology to be used for certain sorts of applications, many of them end-consumer oriented. However, to get to that end-consumer, we need to understand that they don’t want, need, nor “care” about blockchain. Nor do they care about “bitcoin” beyond how it can enhance or detract from their daily lives.
The end-user population wants things that are easy to use and which work well. They don’t want Metamasks, Gwei, private keys or being paranoid about bugs in smart-contracts wiping out all their money. They want popcorn and bubble gum. As with all great technological shifts, the current counsel of thought leaders is understanding that it needs to give people what they need, not what they say they want.
Meaning that for blockchain to get from where it is today, (mainly as an “infrastructure developing infrastructure” and as a device of speculation) to something prevalent in daily lives, we need to consider an end-consumer ecosystem.
This ecosystem in order to be palatable and widely adopted by the general population, would need to have a few key components:
1. — The ecosystem would not ask users to change their existing behaviors in any major way. I always like to point to the example of FitBit, where they found success because all a user had to do was put this “thing” on their wrist and it collected, analyzed and packaged data and feedback for that user. I will add that by the mere fact of immersing in an ecosystem, change naturally will come about organically. However, any barriers to entry must be set very low.
2 .— The ecosystem would give added value to a user’s experience where none was previously imagined nor expected. Before “iPhones” we had Blackberries and Nokias and that was as far as our sight could see. Mr. Jobs saw a little further, and gave us the dawn of something interesting that we didn’t even ask for. Specific to the blockchain, the “main” consumer draw (that most consumers do not yet realize!) is the concept of data sovereignty. By this I mean the idealized notion that all of our data and identity is de-siloed, fully owned and accessible to the owner in an immutable way. If you try to explain this concept today to a common end user, you will need to have your Plato Cliff Notes ready. But once realized as a fully functioning solution for the real world, we will wonder how we ever effectively functioned before its advent.
3 — The ecosystem would function in a perpetually engaging way that not only continually recruits new users, but re-engages existing users. The result of constant re-engagement (and actually the definition of an “ecosystem”) is that users “create” content, perpetually entertaining themselves within the boundaries provided. Medium, where this article is hosted, is a perfect example. They give us the “tools” and the “distribution” and we fill in the rest. In the blockchain specific realm, many things will move to distributed ledgers— things that have to do with identity and things that have to do with data that needs to be immutable or de-silofied. The reality is that unlike Mao’s ideal, a thousand flowers will not bloom. There is just one Facebook — there is just one Google, and as the need for blockchain-based technology becomes apparent, it will also be apparent that we need a singular, unified ecosystem for end-consumer usage.
Why?
Because for consumer usage — blockchain technology has a distinct value which can be broken into two parts, which — based on their inherent nature need to behave in a unified manner.
One — Sovereign Identity — There are numerous “plays” vying to be the defacto Sovereign Identity provider for life. All of your personal information in one place, immutably owned by you on the blockchain. It really is a beautiful concept (until it isn’t!)
Two — Data Sovereignty — All of the data collected by various entities and IoT objects gathered (de)centrally in a de-siloed manner. This effectively means that your driving record, your health records, you web browsing records and how many points you scored in the 4th quarter in the finals of your senior year varsity basketball game are all effectively categorized and hashed. It really is a beautiful concept (until it isn’t!)
Currently, end-consumers don’t know they need these things, and whether we agree or disagree — it is clearly where the world is heading.
The next step for our young industry is a process of consolidation. The current tangle of blockchain DAPPS and tokens acting as siloed independent players, have no longevity and must be unified onto a singular platform for true mass market appeal to ignite.
It is not my place to say it will be this platform or that ecosystem. What I can say with certainty is that consumers don’t care, as long as it works. The forward thinking blockchain technologist would consider diverting some of their attention from the constant incremental improvement of “it’s like this, but it does this too” into reaching for the concept of the fabled technology jump or better summarized as “how do we get people to actually use this?” :-)
See you on the moon.
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