Answering The “What” of Cryptocurrecy and Blockchain
This is a brief insight into what would be our mission statement. Part of the “why” of all of this, and what drives us when we think about what WalletPet and Cryptie need to be.
When we started our research into the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, the first thing we had to do was try and develop a familiarity with the terminology. The learning of new concepts and ideas is often about how relatable they are made to be, and this comes from how terms within these ideas and concepts tie to terms used elsewhere. It’s association. This creates a baseline of accessibility.
When looking into blockchain and cryptocurrency, that association didn’t really seem to be that present. On the surface, the current parlance pulled together from memes and shot-from-the-hip language (HODL) that kind of sticks in some places, and probably won’t in others. Leaders choose to coin (pun not intended, but hey) their own terms for existing concepts that could very well go by more familiar names (airdrops are kinda deposits… but yes, with caveats).
It’s fascinating to be part of this developing area. With very few established standards, with room to create and contribute in ways that could become a standard for the future, or at least a reference in the history of it’s development. I imagine this was similar to how it felt operating within the pre-dot com boom, where everything is new, or for game developers with the Atari 2600, when hardware shifted from being single game machines.
What we are looking to do with WalletPet is to make this technology, or the concepts, understandable and accessible for everyone. On some level, we want people to at least know the “whys” if they can’t fully grasp, or have an interest in the “hows”.
And when we say everyone, we do mean everyone.
Our early user tests were incredibly eye opening. We’d gone into these with our own knowledge and assumption of what may or may not be understandable by people who are not actively searching for this kind of info. We did our research, but in some ways we may have ignored the fact that due to the nature what we do and our backgrounds, that we have a foundation in technology. We were thinking we’d be teaching things one to two steps ahead of the reality.
For an example, external payment has become common on phones: Apple Pay, Google Pay, WeChat Pay, etc… there are plenty of ways to process payments through or with your mobile device, and introducing the term of a wallet to people immediately got them relating that to these types of functions. I mean, why wouldn’t it? It’s quite natural to link the ideas of payment and wallets together. But with a cryptocurrency wallet, it’s really not quite that.
Depending on the functionality of a wallet, it could be more apt to call it an account, or a piggybank of sorts, if we look to use common associable terms.
These are the very base concepts (we are creating a wallet, and this was a confusion with even that), and it got us thinking about addressing something like the concept of gas (a transfer fee) or the blockchain itself (a database). These aren’t even the one or two steps, but whole leaps ahead of what needs to be learned first.
It should be said, we’re not looking to dictate the language around the technology. Our background is in learning and education, as well as game experiences for casual players. We know how to present new concepts, and make them familiar.
Today’s smartphones with their ubiquity appear to have raised the tech-savviness of people, the fact is, is that most use the bare minimum of what phones can do, especially when connected to the internet. We never really had to learn, as it was made just made accessible. But maybe that has come back to bite us, especially more recently with the likes of privacy. We probably should have tied this accessibility with understanding.
There will of course be people who use WalletPet, who just want to play the game, or maybe just want somewhere to store their currency, without caring too much about the ins and outs of the technology. And this is definitely a player that we want to have on board, but we want to take the approach where there is a choice — if they do want the knowledge, we’ll try and provide it.
Not everyone is savvy on how banks operate, or what certain interest charges mean, but banks and financial institutions have in the past used this to disadvantage to consumers. We don’t want that, and we think that lines up well with the high-level ideas behind blockchains and cryptocurrency: they’re democratic, decentralised, open.
