Spreading Crypto: The Winning Strategy For Broader Adoption

We explore the different approaches that crypto application developers can have as they push their apps to the masses. We also discuss what most of the industry is getting wrong.

Published in

Hightop

7 min readJun 23, 2020

This is the third post of our Spreading Crypto series where we take a deep dive into what it’ll take to help this incredible technology reach broader adoption.

Our first post explored the history of protocols and how they only become widely adopted when a killer application arrives. Crypto will be no different — it needs a killer application.

In our second post, we discussed the current state of application development within our industry. Most of the developer energy and focus is with non-custodial wallets and decentralized applications. I laid out the case for why I think that's a terrible mistake.

Today we’ll be discussing a few unique strategies and approaches that crypto companies take as they push their applications to mainstream audiences. We’ll also share how our approach at Genesis Block is quite different from most in the blockchain industry. Let’s dive in.

Product Choices

Forbes once put me on a list with CZ and Vitalik, saying we were the Champions of Crypto: The Titans Driving Mainstream Crypto Adoption. I was honored and humbled to share that list with those two.

It’s true that I think about this a lot. I love crypto. I love blockchain technology. I want the world to experience it. I believe Genesis Block has a real shot at helping take crypto to the masses.

But when thinking about taking a crypto app to the market, there’s an important decision that every developer, entrepreneur, or company must make. There’s a set of questions that must be answered:

How will crypto be exposed to end-users in the application? Will blockchain tech be front-and-center, requiring users to learn the basics of crypto? Or will it operate more in the background?

These questions are foundational. They establish a tone for how users interact with the product.

If I had to distill the answers to these questions with only two options — as if we’ve arrived at the proverbial fork in the road — here’s how I view the two diverging paths:

Invite the outside world into crypto (internal focus)
Take crypto to the outside world (external focus)

These product choices don’t need to be so binary. It could and should look more like a spectrum. But in practice today, most companies operate at the extremes (mostly on one extreme).

Let’s break down each of these strategies and figure out which one is most likely to be successful.

Option 1: Invite the outside world into crypto

This is the current approach for most companies in our industry. This strategy is about helping people onboard & learn about how to use crypto and blockchain technology. It’s about bringing them into our wonderful, yet strange world. It’s about trying to get more people to drink that delicious crypto Kool-aid.

When so much of the application development in our industry is focused on non-custodial products, it’s essential that users understand the basics of crypto. The consequences of not taking this educational approach can be devastating — the user could lose all their money. For non-custodial applications like MetaMask or Ledger, proper onboarding and education isn’t just a choice, but a requirement.

But even for centralized applications — where this approach is totally optional— this is still the prevailing strategy. The most popular crypto applications work hard to educate n00bs on what crypto is. Coinbase has its earn to learn portal. Binance has its blockchain academy. Gemini has their Learn page. Those are all great resources for people who want to learn.

I totally understand the desire to want to bring people into our crypto world. We’ve discovered something special. We want others to touch it, feel it, experience it. We want others to go down that crypto rabbit hole just like we have.

So, this is the first approach. It requires a lot of education, evangelization, and perhaps most importantly, patience. This is where most of our industry is today: trying to bring people into the world of crypto.

Option 2: Take crypto to the outside world

Though this second option is a lot less popular among the crypto community, this is how I believe we ultimately achieve broader crypto adoption. And it’s exactly how we think about it at Genesis Block.

This approach is about taking crypto to the outside world — to the billions of people around the world. And doing it in a way where they don’t need to learn about the underlying protocols. No crypto education or blockchain knowledge is required.

This strategy is about abstracting away the protocol complexities and delivering a product experience that is shaped for their use-cases.

This is about meeting people where they already are. It’s about delivering an experience in a way that they expect — an app on a phone. It’s about using concepts and frameworks that they already understand — a bank —an institution that’s been around for centuries. It’s about providing financial services that they’ve needed their entire lives — like getting a loan, buying groceries, saving for a vacation, or investing.

This second approach is about shaping, molding, and adapting crypto for the real-world problems that exist outside of our crypto bubble.

What Our Industry Has Wrong

The key distinction between the two approaches is whether crypto knowledge is required to start getting value from the app. Does a user need to be onboarded, educated, and schooled about seed phrases, public & private keys, gas limits, and other crypto-related terminology? Or can the user immediately jump in and receive value?

This is yet another area where I believe our industry is making a terrible mistake. At Genesis Block, we simply don’t think the masses will care to know (or need to know) about how crypto or blockchain works. It’s unnecessary friction.

We don’t make our children learn about TCP/IP before they can browse the web. It seems strange we would consider this strategy with crypto.

Yet, here we are, today most crypto companies are doing just that. Someone has spiked the punchbowl of our crypto Kool-aid. We are not thinking straight. It doesn’t make any sense.

The Winning Strategy

While at Mainframe we produced a number of entertaining videos. We’ve already discussed Dawn of the Dapps which poked fun at how complicated it is to interact with crypto today.

Another video we produced was Rosella Node — it was a Rosetta Stone parody product for people to learn the language of blockchain — all the terminology, phrases, acronyms, and lingo of our industry. That video highlights just how foreign and bizarre our crypto bubble is. There is a lot for normies to learn and absorb when they step foot in our industry.

If we want our crypto applications to go mainstream, then we need to stop forcing people to come into our weird world. It’s overwhelming. It’s intimidating. We need to stop making people learn about blockchain. We need to stop making users backup their seed phrase. Say that out loud — it sounds ridiculous.

The winning strategy is to take this incredible technology, package it up in a world-class application, and introduce it to the world in a way that they understand.

Most “normal” users don’t care what’s under the hood. They just want to know that the application can solve their problems and meet their needs. While the technology is incredibly disruptive, the product experience should feel simple and convenient. No extra friction. No steep learning curve. It needs to fit nicely within their existing workflows.

We need to make our applications approachable, accessible, and available to every user. From day one. Regardless of how much they know about blockchain.

This is how we take crypto mainstream. This is how blockchain technology will be adopted by billions of people around the world. And this is why Genesis Block will play an important role in that effort.