Coffee (and more): Real-world Use Cases as a Gateway for the Blockchain Adoption
Before coming to the Token 2049 blockchain event in Singapore, I was still sceptical about the blockchain hype in Asia.
To be honest, I felt this way before meeting Casey Lau, at the Blockchain Scotland Meeting in August at Codebase Edinburgh. The day before I attended a VC chat event, at the same location, as Codebase usually has several events that you can attend for free. Long story short, he was invited by the organiser of the blockchain meetup, so he was there as a speaker after my tour. Casey explained about the upcoming Token 2049 event and also showed that in Asia there is a growing phenomenon of blockchain projects. The hot spots are Hong Kong and Singapore (and I later learned that Dubai is not to be missed). Since I was going on vacation to Indonesia after completing my master’s degree anyway, I booked tickets to the conference.
Sometime between that and the conference day, I got introduced to CoffeeDAO. The name is self-explanatory. Just like many other communication channels in blockchain projects, I joined their Telegram group and met the founders. I joined when the discussion had been ongoing about Coffee tokens airdrop. The tokens were usable at select coffee shops in Hong Kong (the DAO base) and Singapore, to catch the Token 2049 hype.
I expressed my interest, and later, Gene, the co-founder, assisted me throughout the airdrop process until the tokens were ready at my Metamask. I scheduled a visit before the actual conference to see how the user journey would play out.
CoffeeDAO is accessible on mobile or desktop web. I opened the URL given to me from the Telegram group. The UI looks like this.
It has the number of tokens I received, which was four. One token allowed me to exchange it for one coffee of choice. Since I don’t drink coffee, I opted for a chocolate drink instead.
The coffee shop staff was friendly and willing to explain how to pay using this token. The idea was to sign the transaction using the Metamask (or other wallet of choice) to authorise the transfer from my wallet to the coffee shop’s wallet. That’s it. And I managed to get one delightful chocolate drink to freshen up the hot day in Singapore.
This reminds me of my experience in driving the adoption of a new payment method, back in 2019, in Indonesia. In order to drive a cashless society, the Central Bank of Indonesia (Bank Indonesia) started an initiative called QRIS (QR Indonesian Standard). This aligns with the trajectory of other emerging economic powerhouses like China and India. The QR payment model emerges as the optimal choice due to the low penetration of traditional payment cards and the widespread adoption of mobile devices. When considering accessibility to the general public, mobile payment systems take precedence over card-based models. In the realm of mobile payments, affordable Android smartphones take precedence, as they align with the principles of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), making them more accessible compared to high-end iPhone models, which are often considered expensive in comparison to many other affluent nations.
These budget-friendly Android smartphones come equipped with capable cameras, rendering QR code scanning a seamless process. Unlike traditional barcode formats with limited capacity, QR codes can encapsulate comprehensive payment information, including issuer and acquirer data. Drawing from Indonesia’s actual payment landscape, the QRIS (QR Indonesian Standard) has proliferated widely, propelled by these factors.
When I introduced the new payment model as a senior product manager, I encountered difficulties in convincing users and merchants to embrace it. Those who were used to paying with cash had certain misconceptions, for instance:
- Is my fund safe?
- I still need to top up the electronic wallet balance to make a payment. I don’t have a bank account.
- What if the money is not through? I need to pay again using cash, right?
- What if my fund got stolen? (The concept of having your money not in a physical form was still foreign to many people, especially since my company wasn’t a bank, but a licenced electronic payment provider.)
From the merchant’s side, their concerns were:
- What if the money isn’t received in my bank account?
- What if my cashier (I’m the owner) uses the balance received on the phone since I’m not always in the shop monitoring them?
- How much fee is deducted from the payment, if it’s much higher than the bank POS then definitely I won’t join this programme
And the general one: what if my phone got stolen, or accounts got hacked, etc…
To address these concerns, there were the following responses.
Undoubtedly, ongoing education plays a pivotal role. Human nature tends to resist change, often adhering to the notion of “if it’s not broken, why fix it.” However, for those of us navigating the ever-evolving payment landscape, we must empathise with the public and leverage the concerns as our key selling points, instead of being a totalitarian imposer of technological advancement.
As a product management professional, it’s always been my passion and my job to understand how to bring a solution to the users’ pain points. The pain points here could even be the general pain points of a payment landscape, say, introducing blockchain-based tokens as a payment method.
Without digressing into broader topics such as regulation and geopolitical monetary policy, introducing a new payment method is more feasible when grounded in the framework of financial inclusivity.
Preferred payment methods are habits, so it’s a necessity that the success story from another flow is replicated for a new method, just like below.
This is why in product design, we adhere to the “hero’s journey” narrative, much like the storytelling approach used by Pixar. The user is the hero here, and we want them to experience success. When introducing a novel method, the most effective way to alleviate user reluctance and apprehension is to ensure that the new experience is more gratifying, characterised by speed, security, and no associated losses. That was our key mandate from the Central Bank and senior management in the company when introducing QRIS. How easy and safe it was to pay using your phone was the key message. We didn’t want to traumatise the users with difficult payment or financial loss.
Granted, the early stage of the socialisation and development is always the hardest. It’s during this period that glitches emerge, systems might not yet be fully prepared, pilot merchants’ staff may lack awareness, and various other hurdles can arise. A comparable situation unfolded when I received Coffee tokens via airdrop and subsequently used them for payment at the coffee shop.
My mobile browser scanner didn’t work, the Metamask failed the Google authentication check before signing in, and I had to scan using my laptop browser camera (imagine the awkwardness of scanning a QR using a laptop’s camera)… but I didn’t give up.
My involvement wasn’t solely driven by my passion for this kind of project, but also because of my relatable prior experience as an early product developer. Those at the frontier of innovation must continually test, iterate, and be willing to encounter failures until the system reaches a level of robustness suitable for a broader user base.
Drawing the parallel from the QRIS pilot years ago, the business development team of many e-money players did a great job by including the big merchants where the goods/services were familiar to the people to accept the QR method. It’s an ecosystem built on the issuer and acquirer, anyway. The supply and demand must be developed together.
Similarly, while blockchain is not familiar to the current majority of the countries’ payment landscape, we can emphasise how blockchain addresses longstanding inefficiencies that have been accepted as normal inconveniences, thereby resolving these “acceptable pain points.” This approach extends beyond just coffee purchases to encompass real-world asset tokenisation, like real estate and gold, as well as initiatives such as ReFi projects, like environmental by AquaPurge. While the public might not be familiar yet with DeFi and lending protocols, for example, the real-world use cases make a favourable entry point to introduce the technology.
CoffeeDAO embraces the coffee community, akin to a genuine decentralised organisation that flourishes through its participants. As I’ve observed more frequently within the web3 realm, entrepreneurship is evolving in a similar manner, moving away from the concept of a super app and toward more specialised use cases, establishing a stronger presence among its members.
It’s good to note as well that the economic trend tends to return to the past before the economic giants: small and medium businesses, collaboration instead of competition, and a healthy marketplace.
After sipping my first tangible product purchased with tokens, I came to realise that this is indeed a promising new land.
. . .
Leave comments below, and as always, you know the drill, hit me up on LinkedIn for web3 chats.
Special thanks to Casey Lau and Gene Cheung for this journey to be had :)
