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The projects that have captured the most attention in the ecosystem are those that create novel experiences. Minting Loot directly from a smart contract, buying friends keys, farming food coins, trading the first ordinals on Discord, creating frames, minting one Noun daily, launching a coin on pump.fun, or the latest, building an ai agent that trades coins - these experiments align with Chris Dixon’s phrase: "What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years."
And we've seen this play out. What begins as a niche activity often ends up creating our daily onchain projects. Multiple marketplaces pop up, new tokens are launched daily, NFT collections are everywhere, yield waiting for deposits, we've got frames templates, fantasy games, bonding curves, tipping coins - the list just goes on. What made a few people money during a 24 hour window creates interest in builders to create new experiments.
While all this innovation is exciting and one of the main reasons many of us are hooked on this industry, we have to acknowledge that most of these are short-term experiments for now. Those need to mature with time and we should stop critiquing them with the old "these won't onboard the next billion users" argument.
Not every crypto app needs to aim at onboarding the mainstream. Builders need to choose their target users:
Build for crypto natives
Build for normies
Projects often kick off as something weird and hard to understand, with only a few people figuring them out in the early stages. These projects prioritize infrastructure (80%) over experience (20%). At first, only a niche community gets involved, but as people start sharing threads and talking about their experiences, the project gains momentum. Those are most likely limited to waitlist, getting into our favorite word; FOMO.
These projects change how we interact with value, ownership, and collaboration, sometimes building new token mechanics that challenge us to adopt new behaviours. Being early is a big deal here. Whether you're earning airdrops or getting early access to group chats, these benefits provide enough value, most times converted into capital.
On the flip side, when projects are targeting mainstream users, the focus shifts to ease of use - infrastructure (20%) and user experience (80%). We've got existing building blocks like Coinbase smart wallets, Privy signers, Pimlico paymasters, Syndicate’s transaction cloud, or Zora protocol rewards that help kick off projects with seamless onboarding experiences. Users might not even realize they're interacting with crypto at all.
These are solid building blocks that can be smoothly integrated into apps where owning their social graphs and getting rewarded for participating are a default for every users. From a few people making money while platforms take a cut on current social media, to creating fun social networks.
Why fun? Because we're getting trapped into monetizing our daily social media interactions:
Like a Picture: social minting with protocol rewards
Create and Share Stickers: mint them, and rewards are distributed as stickers get collected and shared
Subscribe: fans get a share as the community grows
The same way we were introduced to "like," "share," "tweet," "reel," or "story," we can innovate beyond monetization. Projects could focus on creating new social interactions rather than changing the number of likes to the number of mints. Not everyone cares about making money; many just want to engage and have fun experiences.
Native crypto experiences often introduce complex mechanisms that only a few understand at first, but over time, these innovations become the norm. As these become the default infrastructure, apps integrate them to create easy user experiences without users having to understand crypto to use them.
But that shouldn't always be the default. Build weird and crypto-native experiences that don't need to expand their target audience. It's ok if only a few of us played Crypto The Game. It's ok if only a few interact directly with a smart contract or bridge to a new blockchain. It's ok if we get excited about weird experiments over a weekend. It's ok to be left-curved, that's what keeps this space alive.
maybe crypto ux doesnt need to be good after all 🤪 … we were so hung up on improving the UX for humans to transact onchain that we traded off interoperability and decentralization. for instance, the introduction of embedded wallets made consumers create new wallets with every new app they signed up with, thereby removing their previous transaction history and onchain identity/reputation. however, we’re getting to a world where a collective of agents will be better, faster, and more efficient at transacting across multiple apps/ecosystems than a human ever will be. agents won’t care if they need to sign multiple steps… and will be much faster than humans at it.
even without agents, the native crypto apps that got the most user had the worst ux build for natives - build smth weird build for normies - build with ux in mind wrote about this some weeks ago https://tomu.xyz/not-every-product-needs-to-onboard-normies
loved this and say this all the time. in fact, i think apps that try to target both tend to be less successful. on one hand, you have bigger TAM, lower willingness to pay. on the crypto native side, less users but much deeper pockets and willingness to experiment
i tried to target both, learned the lesson :)
simple, natural, fast feel most important moving token creation & swaps from apps into social networks helps too. users will probably use both their prefered social client's native wallet - which will be more robust, and handle activites that were formerly fragmented. and whatever advanced tooling emerges here like it did on telegram last cycle
Back with the 19th edition of Paragraph Picks, highlighting some of our favorite writing over the past week or so!
@eclecticcapital.eth explores the the impact of generative AI on creative production, comparing it to past technological shifts and examining how neural networks as creative tools challenge traditional concepts of creativity, media business models, and intellectual property. "In the specific case of neural networks, this means thinking in terms of programmable media generation engines rather than thinking exclusively in terms of particular pieces of media." https://paragraph.xyz/@eclecticcapital.eth/neural-media
@boona reflects on the pivotal work experience that led to an embrace of Web3’s potential for self-sovereignty, highlighting the shift away from dependence on centralized entities through decentralized tools and platforms in the evolving digital art landscape. "The amount of tools and tech that are available for free is at an ATH, and the artists I see doing very well are people who are leaning into the ones that make sense for them and their practice." https://paragraph.xyz/@boona/witness-to-time-and-self-sovereignty
@jonathanking writes about the potential of combining blockchain with AI to create a decentralized, transparent, and accessible digital economy, envisioning a future “Agentic Web” where AI agents on crypto infrastructure drive new onchain applications and economic activity. "The convergence of crypto’s efficiency, borderless nature, and programmability with AI has the potential to transform how humans and machines interact with the digital economy." https://paragraph.xyz/@cbventures/demystifying-the-crypto-x-ai-stack
earlier this week, i wrote on /firstdraft about building for crypto-natives vs normies i did more thinking and wrote about it https://paragraph.xyz/@tomu/not-every-product-needs-to-onboard-normies