Going Mainstream
By: Apan Amos Damri
Vitalik Buterin recently tweeted: “I think there’s too much emphasis on BTC/ETH/whatever ETFs, and not enough emphasis on making it easier for people to buy $5 to $100 in cryptocurrency via cards at corner stores. The former is better for pumping price, but the latter is much better for actual adoption.” (https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1023571651865137152)
I definitely agree with that. Every time we spoke with people in the past months, whether on stage or around the table, I always mentioned I believe we’re solving the greatest barrier to cryptocurrency’s mass adoption.
Whenever I find myself explaining crypto to a smart friend who isn’t familiar with it, one of the first questions that rise will be “can you buy stuff with it?” It’s a valid question because until now the answer was “not really”.
And if you can’t buy stuff with it, if it’s not accepted by vendors, it’s not real money.
I was lucky to be in the internet industry before, during, and after the bubble burst about 18 years ago. Things took off again when we saw the main, simple uses cases become available and effective, like Google for effective search, Wikipedia for information, Skype for communication, Social networks etc. Crypto’s main and simple use case is e-commerce.
It’s not only the ability to buy, the experience is just as important. Crypto apps were built by and for developers — copy/pasting hashes and hexadecimals and interacting with block explorers, all of these keep the average joe out of the game. This is why at Zeex, besides simply enabling purchases with digital assets, we put so much attention and effort into creating a simple, intuitive shopping experience with crypto.
Vitalik’s tweet, Coinbase’s last announcement about offering gift cards (https://blog.coinbase.com/announcing-a-new-way-to-spend-your-coinbase-crypto-e-gift-cards-59687ff77c13), NYSE, Microsoft and Starbucks teaming up to build a crypto ecosystem (http://fortune.com/longform/nyse-owner-bitcoin-exchange-startup/) and many more important voices are echoing our effort to create crypto mass adoption by allowing this field’s main use case — a simple yet powerful e-commerce experience.
