Klaytn Klip Wallet: The Floodgate Is Open
Social graph.
The core element of cryptocurrencies that is often overlooked.
Enthusiasts and the curious alike interact on Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, KakaoTalk, etc. on how excited they are on various apps, protocols, trends, etc. Cryptocurrency, being a technically complex and fairly recent trend, has stirred up tons of confusion and controversy in the past decade. This core element was also what stormed the fanatic boom of ICOs and retail investments into cryptocurrencies in late 2017. KakaoTalk was at the center of this what was then called “Kimchi Premium”
Since then, this industry has made remarkable progress beyond just cryptocurrencies into the emergence of decentralized finance and web3 games — fast-forwarding us to a world where users control their own data and digital assets. Yet, many of these breakthroughs are fairly inaccessible to mainstream audiences and even crypto-natives.
What if we allow consumers to access cryptocurrencies and web3 services directly through their own social graphs?
People have been already doing this for years. Let’s make it native in chats. No new downloads or new logins.
Enter Klip.
No 0x-like hexadecimal address. Send crypto to friends through their kakaoTalk ID. No private key. Mobile app UX with ~1 second finality. No gas fee. 100% free to use.
The smart-contract wallet launched on KakaoTalk has the potential to revolutionize how people store and transfer funds and information. Kakao is the dominant mobile platform in Korea with 96+% market share, 50M+ MAU, and loyal users of ARPU at $40+ USD. We believe this launch is an important experiment towards mass adoption in the most attractive market in the crypto industry today.
Consumers have shown a strong appetite to explore digital assets and try decentralized services through Klip during this soft launch.
Within one day of the soft launch,
over 100k users signed up.
Here are some interesting stats we found:
- 77% completed sign-up after visiting Klip page.
- 52.2% are age under 35. Appealing to the MZ generation.
- 2 Minutes and 18 Seconds spent on avg by each user. (reflects how features and apps are still limited).
- 17% of those who signed-up sent crypto (KLAY) to their friends through KakaoTalk chat.
- 75% of the users are still holding KLAY in their wallet waiting for new features to open up.
(For the soft launch — even BTC nor ETH are supported yet with limited curation of games and Dapps.)
It is easy to underestimate how profound this change will be initially. It may appear as a small modification to a centralized service or platform but as someone who first interacted with digital contents through the limited set of internet service providers (Korean versions of Compuserve), I recognized immediately this change is a paradigm shift. It’s opening the floodgate of decentralized services to mainstream users.
Just like how the Internet was limited, slow, and confusing to most users initially, web3 is immature. As web standards matured, and new interfaces (browsers) simplified and standardized user experience — content and usage exploded on the internet. We believe Klip is signaling this very first step in web3 in an accelerated manner through the social graphs of KakaoTalk users.
(Learn how THETA.tv is leveraging Klip networks to onboard more users on their esports streaming service: blog)
Many have asked for the “killer app” in blockchain in hopes that it will enable a flood of user adoption. We believe the lack of good UX and access to dApps, not lack of killer app, is the biggest bottleneck for mass adoption of dApps and solving that will cause the next boom in adoption.
This opening of floodgate will accelerate the build-up of the composable services in a way we have not seen before, which in its whole self becoming the “killer app.”
Klaytn will be launching its App2App API in the coming months to allow for exactly this. Opening up the composable layers for users to freely access the data they create as they interact with the underlying blockchains (Klaytn and more) means that users and developers can now compose solutions from multiple services. When a user is able to choose services from different providers, the unbundling of services increases the quality and the variety of the underlying components. Creating a competitive marketplace of decentralized services. It also makes the interface (Klip) to those services critically important.
While Klaytn is making blockchain invisible, Klip is welcoming a new stream of users to experience services that we have never seen before.
