Improving the Cardano Onboarding Experience to stimulate growth

Imagine you are new to crypto and a friend of yours has recommended to take a closer look at Cardano. Imagine you are already exposed to Bitcoin and maybe Solana and you heard of a great project running on Cardano. So you want to learn more. What would you find? It is highly likely that you would google ‘Cardano’ and find something like this:

The top search result is of course cardano.org — the website run by the Cardano Foundation to introduce people to the blockchain.

While the website has without a doubt a wealth of information I think it is fair to say, that it has not been build with providing a seamless onboarding experience for new average users in mind, but rather has an emphasis to get blockchain enthusiast up on speed with either developing for Cardano or within understanding in more depths the ins and outs of Cardano.

So let us assume you are not bouncing already on the homepage, but you have enough motivation to keep digging. Quite likely as a new user you would choose ‘individuals’ from the top navigation and then you are presented with this:

These are actually in my humble opinion not exactly the required topics or best wallets for a new user to get started with — and more importantly to get excited about— the thriving ecosystem Cardano is offering today.

What stories need to be told instead?

Put yourself into the shoes of somebody who is either new to crypto, or has only a little bit of exposure and background knowledge already. What stories would you tell this person to get him/her excited about what Cardano has to offer and actually convert this person into an ADA holder and active participant within the Cardano ecosystem?

I think it is one of the following potential five stories:

1. Earn 4.5% on your invested money, without locking up your funds — while supporting great initiavites around the world

In conversations with friends and family I often say something like this:

Cardano has a great and unique so called ‘staking’ mechanism. You stake your funds to a pool with others — while you remain in full control of these funds — and in return you actually earn a 4.5% yield on your money. The people who run this pool also get some rewards from doing so and there are many so called ‘mission driven’ pools, who use these funds transparently to do good in the world.

I never had a conversation, where this has not sparked interest in people already. It is a great springboard to explain in simple terms a few basics on crypto and Cardano in particular:

• what is staking and which role does it play in securing the blockchain?
• where is the money for the 4.5% actually coming from?
• why is it special that you still fully own your money and that it is not locked?

Explaining somebody that for sending money on a blockchain there is a small transaction fee invovled and that instead of this fee staying with a bank or other institution this money is actually redistributed to everybody who participates in securing the blockchain through staking, is for many an eye opening ‘aha’ moment. Even if they do not understand how this works technically.

Bringing in mission driven stake pools and how they do good in the world makes this topic much more emotional and human and truly catches people attention.

And to finish it off: simply add a few sentences of why you can not do this with Bitcoin and why this approach is even way more environmently friendly than what Bitcoin does.

That might seal the deal already and you maybe have converted another user into a future ADA holder. Next step: A kind of getting started guide on how to setup a wallet (which can interact with Dapps and doesn’t take hours to sync), buy your first ADA and stake it within your wallet.

2. Cardano has a thriving NFT ecosystem with many great communities and art projects to choose from to buy your first NFT

Everbody talks about NFTs. So let us just be very clear on how great the NFT ecosystem is and let’s point out some projects, which capture peoples imagination:

On Cardano you can find typical profile picture NFTs. Spacebudz was actually the first 10k collection and is the highest valued NFT project to date. Just recently the NFT project Clay Nation announced a collaboration with Snoop Dog and his son Champ. There is one really unique project called Cardano Trees. You can own these trees, they are actually code running on the blockchain and you can watch your trees grow. And well of course we have apes. This Chilled Kongs project is killing it right now.

And guess what: the NFT trading volumes on Cardano is the third highest right now globally and we have more than a handfull of marketplaces, where you can easily discover all the different projects and buy your first NFT with one of the following wallets. (here is a quickstart guide to buy your first NFT)

Ah and if you are really interested: NFTs on Cardano are actually so called ‘Native Assets’ compared to NFTs on Ethereum or Solana. If you have a few more minutes let me explain what this means and why it is more secure and less risky, as you probably heard some horror stories of people loosing all their NFTs already a couple of times.

You get the idea. Play our strength and get people excited with actual projects, which have a story to tell to capture peoples imagination and make them want to get invovled.

3. Invest even deeper and get started with ‘Decentralized Finance’, which allows everybody to become less dependend on traditional banks

So let’s go after the banks and make clear what you can to in DeFi what you would normally do with your bank:

There are a couple of really cool things you can do on Cardano, which you would normally do with your bank. You can for example use your ADA as colleteral and borrow against it. And there is no lengthy approval process required as if you would try to get a credit from your bank. Or you actually provide liquidity to different financial services on the blockchain and you earn a yield on that. This is for sure more risky than just staking, but it also comes with higher rewards.

DeFi is a complicated beast, but from my personal experience the fact that you can easily borrow/lend on crypto without a bank is always creating strong interest in average users.

The fact that there is even a growing ecosystem of possibilities to invest and earn more yield, by providing liquidity to different protocols — making it apparently clear, that your bank doesn’t have a monopoly on providing attractive investment opportunities to you — makes the case even more compelling and people start to get ready to invest more time into the topic. Which again increases the likelyhood for them to convert and become ADA holders.

Obviously for beginners there is a lot to explain here. So in an improved onboarding experience, you would need to offer easy to comprehend content around things like:

• available DEXs and what providing liquidity and yield farming means
• available borrowing/lending protocols and how you can get started
• a good overview on the risks invovled to participate

One of the key things which should get pointed out in comparison to other blockchains is that liquidity provided in ADA can still be staked and earn that 4.5% — it is a killer feature and you can explain that in easy ways, without getting overly technical.

4. Cardano has a special mission with its engagement in Africa and this attracted unique projects which can make a massive impact

People love to invest in projects which actually have an impact. Look at all the ESG hype of the last years in the ETF and stock market. So let’s tell some compelling stories around these awesome projects on Cardano.

Cardano has a wealth of projects, trying to solve real world problems like for example: making housing affordable in countries, where mortgages are impossible to get — to connect people to the internet, which are completely disconnected today (and we talk billions of people here) — to give financial services to people to build wealth, which otherwise would not have access to these kind of services.

The stories projects like World Mobile, Empowa, MELD, Indigo, Waya Collective and others have to tell are so great stories to get people excited about what kind of impact Cardano might have.

If I speak to people who have already some exposure to crypto I always ask: can you name any project like this building on Bitcoin, Ethereum or Solana? The answer is always: NO

So I truly believe that it is essential to any onboarding experience, to mention these kind of projects and give people a better idea of what Cardano is all about. And if you want to get a step deeper you can easily do this again with more detail about topics like:

• buying native tokens on DEXs to invest in these projects
• expand on staking and that these projects often offer staking themselves
• start to go into the governance DAO topic and make clear that you can actually have a voice in these projects and become a more active participant and vote for proposals

5. On Cardano you actually are automatically part of Catalyst, which is in essence an investment fund investing into projects building on Cardano. And you can vote with your ADA on projects!

Ok so let’s make this a short one. Catalyst is such a massive story. But very few people realize that it actually exists. I would most defintely cover this aspect of Cardano as part of an onboarding experience to make sure that:

• people know when and how they can vote
• people get an idea of what projects have been funded in the past
• people already get a climpse on upcoming projects for voting

Again. Don’t stay abstract. Tell the stories of thriving projects on Cardano, who actually got funded already through catalyst and get potential future ADA holders excited about upcoming projects they could vote on.

The big advantages of an improved onboarding stories for Cardano

So why would you create an onboarding experiences with content from the five examples I gave above? I hope it is obvious that as less technical and theoretical you are — and as more tangible and practical you are , the higher the likely hood is for people to get excited and take action to become an ADA holder.

You have to treat the onboarding experience like a conversion funnel, where step-by-step you convince and guide people to get started and help them doing their first steps — while developing the understanding what makes Cardano so special compared to the alternatives out there.

To unlock more growth for Cardano and crypto in general we have to reach out to a new kind of target group and I am afraid that the ‘just keep building and people will come’ mantra is not good enough.

There is a lot of bias and caution in the next generation of potential crypto holders which has to be addressed and while Cardano is perfectly suited to address all of these concern — we are not good enough yet to get this communication job done.

I also truly belive that as soon there would be more content about these 5 topics in one central and easy to discover place available, as less FUD about Cardano would successfully spread. We as a community spent too much time to fight misperception of Cardano on Twitter. I think it is actually the wrong place to fight this.

We rather need to get our basics right and tell a better story on the website everybody discovers who just googles ‘Cardano’, to kill this FUD and allow everybody who just spends 10 minutes on a website to realize: ‘holy shit, there is so much going on here.’

The big caveat of telling these stories as part of an onboarding experience

But of course there is also a big ‘BUT’. And I guess many of you reading have this thought in their mind already: you would be highlighting selected projects and what could possibly be a fair process to decide on what to highlight?

I totally get that the current Cardano website by the Cardano Foundation completely avoids on purpose to highlight any projects. They would probably face a storm of tweets of why project ABC get’s featured, but project XYZ doesn’t.

Everybody trying to shill their bags again.

I have no definitive answer to that yet. I only strongly believe that the benefit of featuring projects as part of an improved onboarding experience — to create more tangible, appealing and emotional connections to future ADA holders — will benefit the entire ecosystem in a proportion which outweights the downside of giving selected projects more prominent exposure.

And I also believe that this topics could be tackled in a Cardano like fashion, where the decision making process on which projects to feature when and for how long is, is decentralized and there is a fair voting mechanism combined with a rotation system in place, to do all the different great projects building some justice in getting this kind of exposure.

Where do we go from here?

So this whole discussion took off a bit yesterday on Twitter and I wanted to take the time here on Medium to formulate the case for why we need a different onboarding experience and give a glimpse on how this — from a story perspective — could look like for Cardano to unlock more growth.

Actually Charles also weighted in yesterday by saying the following:

I get his point. If you would want to provide this kind of experience via cardano.org it would have to be dealt with by the Cardano Foundation and it could also be expressed as a Catalyst proposal to fund the work which would need to go into this. I think it is a viable way.

Obviously there are many more players who would have an interest in developing better onboarding experiences for Cardano. The most obvious once are probably exchanges and wallet providers. The big disadvantage of that is though, that people would have to get to this point first, before their onbaording experience would have any effect.

But the journey starts sooner. Currently people who are curious will predominantly google and quite likely land on cardano.org

Alternatively we could build in essence a standalone onboarding site like ‘go-cardano.org’ or something like that and invest so much in SEO, that it can compete and is at least the second search result after the cardano.org website. But that would also be a very big effort and would be a whole endeavour and maybe even a business in itself.

So this acted for me as a first brain dump on the topic. Let’s dicuss if you like and take it from here.