1confirmation founder: 4 suggestions for crypto consumer app builders

Original author: Nick Tomaino, founder of 1confirmation

Original translation: Luffy, Foresight News

My strongest belief over the next 10 years is that crypto apps will permeate every aspect of culture. Over the past 10 years, crypto apps have been primarily in deep tech and finance, but over the next 10 years, we will see crypto consumer apps collide with news, politics, sports, health/fitness, music, live video, podcasts, and more. These apps will be among the most useful and valuable ever.

This view seems to be contrary to the current mainstream investors, who have been pouring large sums of money into unoriginal zero-sum products. While the market is hyped about the Nth scalable L1 and yield-yielding stablecoins, developers are quietly building products that will enable new consumer behaviors that will help the industry attract 1 billion users as soon as possible and benefit the world.

I’ve learned a lot from my early involvement in many consumer applications (Coinbase, OpenSea, Polymarket, dYdX), which have had the greatest success in connecting crypto to culture and attracting new users over the past decade.

If you’re thinking about the next generation of top-tier crypto consumer applications, here are four lessons you might find useful:

The road to widespread adoption of crypto consumer applications won’t happen overnight, so focus on what you believe in (besides making money) and stick with it. Polymarket has been written off multiple times before, but founder Shayne Coplan and the team firmly believe that prediction markets can bring more truth to the world. They encountered obstacles along the way that would have caused most people to give up, but their strong beliefs helped them survive. Polymarket has traded over $423 million in 2024 and is currently playing an important role in the 2024 US presidential election. Remember: faith and persistence will eventually pay off.

Catering to both purists and tourists is key. For more than a decade, Coinbase has cleverly existed at the intersection of purists and tourists. If a product is too pure, it will remain in a niche market and never break out. There may be a small group of people who are well-versed in historical knowledge and appreciate the nuances, but building only for purists will limit the size of your market. If a product is too focused on tourists, people will like it for a while and then leave it, coming and going quickly. In 2012, Brian Armstrong made an early design decision to provide users with custodial wallet services because they believed that non-custodial wallets would not promote mass market growth. Thanks to this decision, Coinbase is now a public company worth over $50 billion. (Extended reading: 1co nfirmation: Purists and tourists, who are the main drivers of the crypto world? )

Get to know the users and culture of your market deeply. When OpenSea launched in 2018, there were other NFT markets that raised more money and had more high-profile investors involved. OpenSea won because Dfinzer and Xanderatallah didn’t care about false prestige or creating some false narrative for the company, they just focused on building a useful product. They talked to every NFT creator, they went to every NFT event, and they understood the culture better than their competitors. Don’t just care about the surface narrative, dig deeper, and you’ll outlast the surface players.

Create your own ecosystem. Truly useful applications do not need to cater to any existing ecosystem, but create their own. dYdX has already pointed the way in this regard. Antonio MJuliano and the team started with the Ethereum ecosystem, then launched L2 powered by StarkEx, and then launched the dYdX chain powered by Cosmos SDK. This trend may become more common in the future. Once you prove the utility of your application, you can launch your own chain and have full sovereignty.

The last 10 years of crypto consumer applications have been interesting, but the next 10 years will be 100x more interesting.