From Hype to Hope: Building for Mainstream Adoption
Anyone who has been around Web3 for a few years is familiar with the hyperbole that accompanies almost every project. Whether it’s a game or a metaverse with 8-bit graphics, projects often fall short of their promises.
This is one of the main reasons Web3 communities are so money-focused. Deep down, they know that projects often fail to come close to the utility they promise, so instead, their attention is locked on how much they can increase their investment.
Decentralization offers a beautiful utopia, but most people still keep much of their crypto on centralized exchanges. This is one of the reasons exchanges still dominate the space and can make or break projects.
It’s because using centralized services over decentralized ones is faster, easier, and cheaper. People are opposed to the effort involved in generating a wallet, sending funds to an address, or swapping tokens on a DeFi platform such as Uniswap.
There are fears over sending funds to the wrong address, forgetting keys, being hacked, or feeling ripped off by gas fees. On the other hand, centralized exchanges offer quick, easy swaps with low costs. The user interface is simple, and the learning curve is smooth.
These are the keys to their success: speed, reliability, low fees, and, above all else, ease of use. So when projects talk about onboarding the next hundred million people to Web3 and going mainstream, it’s essential to assess their ability to achieve that.
The simple fact is that for crypto and Web3 to go mainstream, the user experience has to improve vastly. It has to be more like Web2, so simple your grandma could use it. If they can’t do that, you can forget everything they’re saying about onboarding millions of users.
A case in point was the Chinese government’s rollout of their Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), the eRMB. Ahead of its launch, they took advantage of COVID lockdowns to ensure that most people were familiar with using WeChat and Alipay digital wallets for their health pass.
This meant that even people in rural China had a smartphone and learned to use a digital wallet. It’s no coincidence that towards the end of COVID-19, they launched the eRMB through those very same wallets.
If they’d asked users to download MetaMask, learn about the seed phrase and how to store it, and then generate a health pass using their wallet address, the adoption of their CBDC would have been dead on arrival. Instead, they understood that the user experience had to be simple and easy to follow.
Zesh’s approach to onboarding users is similar. We’ll use a behind-the-scenes wallet that seamlessly integrates into our apps so users more familiar with Web2 approaches won’t be daunted. Most won’t even realize they have a Web3 wallet.
From a development perspective, it’s quicker and easier not to take this approach. To offload that layer of difficulty onto the end user. But any project that takes that approach isn’t ready for mainstream adoption.
We’re focused not just on the present users of Web3, but our sights are firmly set on the wave of new users the upcoming bull market will bring to the space. This is just one of the aspects of Zesh that sets us apart from other offerings on the market.
Our team is a hybrid mix of Web2 and Web3 experts, and through working together, we’ll bring the best of both worlds to Zesh. Any other approach is so ‘last cycle’.