Activation in crypto -- how crypto apps go mainstream! by Max Segall | Devcon SEA

[Music] [Music] hello everyone thank you for coming to our talk on how crypto goes mainstream it's a topic that's very near and dear to our heart I work at privy and privy is an e easy and Powerful way for crypto products to onboard their users and privy Powers many of the most popular crypto apps from Trading apps like hyper liquid and pump. fun to restaurant loyalty projects like Blackbird to social apps like Zora and friendtech and so from supporting many of the most popular consumer teams we've gotten a really good lens into what makes a great consumer crypto product and it's really exciting at this Devcon to hear how many people are talking about consumers and and apps and you know one of the things I've seen a lot on Twitter is people saying where are the apps and how are we going to get more users on chain and this is a problem we think about a ton and at privy we we um actually I'll tell you a little a little bit about what we're going to talk about first and then we'll dive into it so we're going to talk about the changes in our market like why as an industry we've gone from you know not not giving much airtime to Consumer to it being something that everyone is is referencing and talking about we're going to talk about the crossroads we're in and why we're starting to see a really exciting acceleration in the crypto Market we're going to talk about what great looks like in consumer so what some of the qualities of the most popular cons consumer apps will look like we're going to talk about where we go from here how we're going to get every consumer product on chain over time at priview we we we talked a lot about you know what what will it take for a consumer product to break out and new tech often needs to power experiences that are orders of magnitude better than the status quo and so to use an internet analogy like if you were building a new internet if you build something that's better than dialup you know that's not going to cut it because now we have fiber and so with consumer you know we need to build something that's you know a better experience a more compelling experience than something like Uber or Facebook or Tik Tok in order to get you know everyone to start using it and to us there there are three things that we get from building on crypto rails that you know aren't possible if you're building offchain the first is you know this idea of ownership the assets that you're accumulating in your app are yours you you can get kind of shut off from the app but you still have the assets that you've earned and you can take them with you which is related to the second Point around interoperability by building on a blockchain you can take your assets experiences with you from app to app so you can mint an nft on Zora and then go sell it on openc or any other nft Marketplace and the third is around payments so crypto offers a digital first instant payment layer which is a really exciting new capability that's not possible offchain historically getting that combination of attributes in a product required using something like this metamask it accomplished you know everything that crypto enables really well but it requires you to to be very familiar with crypto and if you know you don't care about crypto or you're not willing to go through the Hoops to set up you know your crypto life this might be too daunting to you and it's you know been a big reason why many crypto apps haven't you know been able to cater to people who don't know much about crypto and a lot of the first popular crypto app experiences powered by you know these external wallets they looked like this um they were great for discreet onetime user experiences come in do a financial transaction get what you need leave and then you know come back when you need to do your next financial transaction but they weren't they weren't well set up for multi-session user Journeys and the teex stack has come a very long way to enable these richer consumer experiences so you know a lot of time a lot of the time we talk about like what are the barriers to consumer products really breaking out at C you know on on crypto rails and there's sort of like a lot of the ux around making crypto apps easy to use there's scalability cheap you know fast reliable blockchains and then there are kind of elements around the transaction experience and making that easier and for the first time we have a Tex stack that kind of combining all of these attributes allows us to build great consumer experiences and as a result we've seen the market evolve quite a bit so we've gone from you know here we're highlighting you know what we see as like kind of the most popular most visible consumer products consumer crypto products of the year um starting with you know Financial one-time defi use cases to much kind of broader defi use cases to Bringing art and culture on chain to gaming um to social social interactions and now having a full social layer and you know now we're starting to see these more kind of Rich consumer product experiences but we're at a crossroad so we have kind of everything we need to build a great consumer experience um but we're not at the point where every app we're using is on crypto rails and so the question we ask a lot at privy is What will what will it take for that to happen and we see two trends that are both very exciting that are both accelerating a ton right now that we think will unlock the next wave of crypto products for consumers the first trend is crypto native app so products that are built on crypto rails the crypto infrastructure is very much core to you know the product experience that are going after a mainstream audience that are trying to really hide abstract a lot of the crypto mechanics away from users but crypto is like fundamental to the product from the outset so one of the you know most visible examples of this right now is poly Market which is a product built on crypto rails but you know has attracted orders of magnitude more users than the kind of core crypto native population and you know openc accomplished this this Blackbird the restaurant loyalty app is accomplishing this pump. fun is accomplishing this and the number of crypto products you know that are Crypton native crypto from the outset that are catering to a broader audience is accelerating a lot and this is one Trend that we think is going to continue accelerating and we break down kind of like there are four four common attributes a lot of a lot of these experiences have the first is that they engaging like they're experiences that people want to use and come back to and participate in so whether that is you know something like Zora where you can consume content you can like content as a Creator you get rewarded for posting content to games like friend pet to receipts which is a fun competitive fitness app on chain you know we're seeing you the Baseline of just a fun experience that people want to engage with again and again as the most common attribute for crypto native products that are breaking out into a broader audience the second and one that's very kind of close to home for us at privy is uxx for everyone so even though it is a crypto experience at its core it is friendly and familiar to people who know absolutely nothing about crypto so whether it's you know what we have on the left with pirate nation which is one of the most popular crypto games which allows users to sign in with Google login or Discord and get a fully self- custodial powerful wallet under the hood that could do anything you need it to on chain to anime um which is a fun ecosystem of experiences centered around anime where you know you could sign up and start collecting onchain assets but you have no idea that you know anything interacting with is crypto to B3 who implemented an experience uh we call guest mode where you can get a wallet without actually creating an account uh which is an experience that's familiar to people who shop online for example and aren't going to create an account in order to purchase something you know a lot of a lot of the ux elements of these apps are accessible for people who don't know anything about crypto the next is uh real world tie-in so a lot of the most popular apps we see are manifesting in the real world in different ways so whether that's you know Blackbird who has many of the most popular restaurants in New York there are physical pucks at the restaurant that you can tap your phone to to earn rewards points that you could redeem to either pay your bill or um get a free drink at the restaurant to you know seeing onchain Assets in Walmart and Target as as the pudgy Penguins team is accomplishing you know showing onchain Assets in the real world is another very common element for apps that are breaking out and then the last piece is around account funding and getting people to transact on chain without taking them through the the multi-step journey of getting crypto assets so we have a video here of one of our customers Rodeo who has a really nice Apple pay funding flow where you can you know purchase uh balance that allows you to Mint nfts in the rodeo app using Apple pay and you know once you once you have your credits as they're framing it here you could just go and collect the asset and it feels familiar and leverages you know payment methods you're already familiar with so those are some of the attributes of these Crypton native experiences that are targeting mainstream users and then there's this parallel trend of products that were built you know without crypto in mind that are leveraging crypto infra to accomplish things that wouldn't have been possible without it and this is one of the most exciting things we're seeing at privy right now and it's accelerating a ton where many many fintechs in particular are starting to leverage crypto for payment rail benefits and and we'll get into some of the other attributes um but this is this is this parallel Trend where these products already have a ton of reach they have tens hundreds of millions of users and they're giving them access to crypto rails and the attributes that a lot of these projects have in common are one they're looking to use crypto rails to give users access to USD balance so this this is a product do they're uh one of the most popular Neo banks in Latin America and they're using crypto infra to give people in Mexico and Argentina access to USD balance um but you would never you would never know there's a trace of crypto infra in the app it just feels like you have a dollar balance you can you know earn your paycheck in USD which is a great store of value and then spend it you know with a card attached to the account anywhere you know merchants accept card so that's a really cool Trend we're seeing another is that mainstream apps are are starting to use crypto as just a more efficient payment and rail so this is an announcement from deal the payroll company which allows any contractor on the platform to accept their payroll in usdc and so not only are you know contractors getting faster access to the payment but they're not dealing with a lot of the kind of big FX hits you take on both sides of the transaction uh if you know you were converting from uh payment in USD to you know a foreign currency and the bank would you know take a pretty big fee on the FX conversion so that's a really exciting Trend as well and then the last Trend we're seeing with mainstream products and experiences building on crypto rails is some of the inter ability you benefits you get from building on chain so earlier this year at Coachella users who had specific assets that they bought on openc could then go on to the Coachella website and Link um link the same wallet they used to buy the assets on openc and unlock VIP passes and there was a special kind of section of the Coachella venue where users could go and you know get access if they had this NF in their in their wallet and this is like a very early example of some of the Cross app experiences where users can users can take history or purchases they've made in in one crypto app or one thing on chain and unlock things completely elsewhere so the two trends that we're really excited about that we think will unlock the next wave of crypto usage are one you know these very kind of crypto deliberate products that are finding ways to attract uh mainstream user base with poly Market as like a great example of this we think that's going to continue accelerating and then on the other hand you have all of these products fintech and and largely fintech but over time we expect many more that are looking to build on crypto rails to unlock some of the interoperability and payment benefit you get and in our view these are Moment In Time distinctions eventually you know we're just going to talk about crypto as an enabling technology that products build on and so this you know Crypton native vers mainstream product is a very moment in time distinction we think you know these two Trends will converge and everyone will start building on crypto rails in order to access the things you get that make crypto special we think kind of as that plays out it's important to keep your keep your focus on the things we get from crypto and what we're all building toward and not you know concern ourselves with okay I believe crypto needs to evolve in you know whether it's this chain or this user base or that user base and just really focus on what are the unique benefits we get from building on crypto rails and you know the last thing will'll leave with is you we really believe there's never been a better time to be building products on chain you have all the infrastructure coming together you have all of the energy behind crypto the visibility we're getting as a market and we're really excited to see the next wave of products that that come so thank you all very much for the time and if there are any questions happy to take them Thanks Max I hope everyone took some notes on how to build a popular product so without further Ado let's go talk about some of the questions so we can look right here the first one is what is an example of a popular feature that drove massive adoption for a project yeah one of the most kind of Novel things we saw in a product since starting privy was how friendch really leaned into an existing social graph to make the first time user experience a much richer experience um you had a bootstrapped so to to rewind for a second frch when you signed up asked users to link their Twitter accounts and then there was a populated social graph and you know users that you were familiar with and that kind of immediately gave the app experience some more life you had kind of friends and recognizable faces on the app and I think that is one of the patterns that that team introduced that you know we still see everywhere today that made for a much richer experience agreed so the next one would be why is most web tree adoption focused on speculative platform like poly markets or mcoin is the trend overshadowed the development of real world utility in the web tree space yeah well because the crypto rails make for easy transaction experiences you know facilitating whether it's trades or or bets is like a very kind of easy to stand up use case we we have a we have a framing at privy uh where there's sort of we we call it the carrot in the stick and up until very recently because the ux around crypto experiences was a bit tougher it was a bit kind of more Hoops to jump through to get up and running in the app apps needed to incentivize you know why should I use this app with a little bit more of a carrot whether that's like speculation or or yield to get the user to drump through the the hoops and we think kind of as the ux improves you can have less speculative use cases because it's you know the same reason why I would get up and start using any product um I can just kind of use the crypto product and enjoy whatever the real world experience is behind it okay so the next one is the tradeoffs required to enable ux things like Google login wallet seems to stretch Definition of non-custodial is it really non-custodial if I need to log through a specific provider yeah so this one gets a little bit into like the mechanics of how privy works but when a user creates a wallet with privy we split the user's private key into different shares and they're assembled in a way that you know neither privy nor the customer we working with has the ability to access the user's private key the user is the only party that can and actually you know assemble the key on their device and control the wallet and so even though you know Google is the signin method that's only one the the kind of oth link is only one out of the three shares that we split the key into and so you know that doesn't kind of make the wallet experience custodial okay so we have time for one last question this pretty interesting one as well what's the industry that you think will on board the most users on chain in the next 5 years yeah we're really excited about what we're seeing in the finch and payments market so seeing you know all of these Neo Banks really starting to lean into crypto payment rails to give users access to USD faster cheaper payments you know potentially better Financial products over time we think that's a really powerful driver of adoption and you know if every banking product over the next five years somehow incorporates a crypto payment Rail and gets their users wallets that's a really massive Tailwind for usage in the market Thanks Max can we give him a round of applause for an insightful conversation they had stay tuned we'll be right back at 3 p.m. with the next session all right thank you