Beyond Buy Low, Sell High: The New Era of Onchain Apps

Transcript

Hello. Hello. Okay, these are working. Hey folks, how's it going? Good, good, good, good. Okay, so uh you've got David Feld and I here. I'm Nick Shaheen. We're going to talk about the new era of onchain apps. So, uh David and I work at Banklist. I work on partnerships BD. David works uh as a writer on the alpha team. And for the last year, we have done a show called Apps No Entre. Has anybody seen this show? Good, good, good, good. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. So, we've done 35 episodes uh where we talk to different apps in crypto, different apps in the ecosystem to try and learn about what they've built, how they've built it, how they use the blockchain, where they're going.

Uh and we've learned a ton, right? There's so many apps out there. Some of them are doing well, some of them are not. Some are resonating, some are not. Some are working, some are not. Uh but why should you listen to David and I right what what do we bring here um that might be interesting to you uh we are not product builders per se we are marketers but uh what like makes us unique is that we've tried so many apps we've tried hundreds 150 200 how many apps have we tried David I'd say that's an accurate number somewhere in there and uh we've talked to all these different app builders and we as users as writers as someone who builds partnerships uh and as like co-host of a show, we've we've learned a lot about

what works and we think that there are a bunch of takeaways of what you guys can build or how you can market what has been built um based on what's been built already. Um and yeah, it's a really unique time for apps. I think that everybody's like, "Oh, this is the year where apps are finally going to take off." But the infrastructure is here, the ideas are here, there are new ways to do it. Um, and we're going to talk about the different like archetypes that make it happen and a few case studies of apps that have really uh made a mark on us and why. Um, and so yeah, over to you David. Yeah. So overall to begin, what's enabling this shift to make it a great time to build apps are three core catalysts. One, newfound infraaturity.

You know, you have account abstraction, you have embedded wallets, you have native O. Um, you have L2s, particularly base, which just overall provide a pretty sleek experience to using an app, which removes the multiple transactions, the confirmations, everything that was very much holding us back from a sort of quote unquote web two native experience last cycle. Two, the these can all be mixed and matched to create a series of different apps pretty quickly. Um, two, we have memes as design input. Um, if you know I'm sure there's a lot of different opinions on memes here, but overall I think they have shown us very clearly where crypto's value lies in attention, social identity, and overall

group rituals being formed on chain. Um, they're internet native assets on the internet. It makes sort of perfect sense. I think they also have fostered a fast-paced cryptonative activity that people keep coming back to day in and day out. Last cycle we had DeFi yields and you know that's sort of just like parking capital or moving capital to find the best place to park capital. But with memes people are actively transacting non-stop swapping tokens. And then three mobile first. Crypto has finally gone mobile first. Um usage has flipped to 63% of all crypto comes from mobile activity rather than desktop. Now that's a lot. And mobile wallets continue to hit new all-time highs in overall usage. Overall, this is just a

great foundation for actually building apps rather than just infrastructure that people can use on a day-to-day basis. Thanks. Together, um overall in the apps that we've seen, these three catalysts have sort of bird three successful archetypes for apps um that really retain users rather than just being a sort of flash in the pan. One, apps that build uniquely around memes. And what I mean by this is that they solve the problem of chaos for memes. you know, Pump Fund has launched over 11 million tokens now, which is, you know, quite a lot. You know, I people are probably a little disappointed about no alt season. That's why. Um, but to make sense of this chaos, apps that build

uniquely around memes, to lessen the noise, to lessen the potential loss of memes, and to lessen the degeneracy, we've seen those apps have a strong retention over months. Um, two, apps that provide novel speculation. What I mean by this is I think there's a very sort of like the uncanny valley. There's a very fine line between financializing something new and over financialization. I think crypto is slipping especially with so many new fairly launched meme coins or different launchpads into over financialization which can just feel really exhaust exhaustive and wear on the user rather than actually provide a novel way to speculate.

Shining stars here are really prediction markets. And then three are apps that soften crypto's default sort of PVP dynamic and introduce the illusion or hopefully and in a lot of cases actually the reality of a collaborative online experience which crypto promised us from the get- go and really just having you know all trading all speculation being public. So we'll start with apps that really showcase this unique design around memes. One, obviously heard some uh sounds in the audience.

People probably know Axiom. It's a pretty well-rounded unified trading terminal. And before I go into it, I just want to preface that while you know it's a shining star and a great example, the trading terminal sort of vertical definitely feels like it is sort of matured to a point where there are winners. Granted, Photon felt like that. Then came Axiom, but Axiom's suite really feels like a product which has sort of reached the final stages of trading terminals. So be wary if you want to build another trading terminal is all I'm going to say. But what Axiom does is it essentially bundles your wallet trackers, your Twitter trackers, your token analytics, your discovery all

into one single interface, as well as also have hyperlquid pers. So you really don't have to go anywhere else for trading. Everything's really smooth, one click, feels like no gas. Um, and also they do lessen so they're lessening the noise overall of memes to drive that home. And two, they're also lessening the loss because as you trade, you get some rewards back in soul. Two, we have purity. Purity finance is not pictured on the screen. Um, just because there's no space, nothing about, you know, it's standing, but what it does is essentially just lets you batch close token accounts. So the architecture of Salana works as every time you get a token, you essentially have to put down a 0.002

soul deposit to open that and hold that token in your wallet. And you know for people who are trading hundreds thousands of memes on a weekly monthly basis if you were to batch close those me those accounts let's say you close 100 accounts that's 02 soul back a thousand accounts that's two soul back and right this is lessening the loss and also I think what I want to call out for purity is that they've done a really good job around sort of using memes as design input again to make these little things called puries which are these little animated characters that they which has formed a really tight user base around their app and kept people coming back again and again. And then three, we have one of my favorites which

is called Lemonrop, which I'd call it a self-imposed tariff on all trading. Um, what you essentially do is you download the Lemon Drop extension and you tack on an additional transaction to any swap or transaction you make on Salana. say, you know, 50 cents, a dollar, I set that I will buy a dollar or 50 cents of Bitcoin with every buy and sell I make on Salana. So, you're essentially dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin while you trade memes, lessing the the degeneracy and, you know, actually owning something that will be worth value uh in longer than a week's time. You said degeneracy.

You said you weren't going to say degeneracy. Oh, no. Okay. So, uh, I want to include this quote. Uh, good artist borrow, great artist steal. Uh, David was like, "You probably shouldn't include that." And based on the lack of any laughter in the crowd, I probably shouldn't have included a an office reference, American office reference in Europe. But anyways, uh, goods borrow, great steel. I think this makes uh, a lot of sense if you're in crypto, right? There are so many apps that we've seen that are just like evolutions or carbon copies of past apps. And maybe it was the time of the market, maybe it was the like new infrastructure that's been implemented, but now it's working. Now it makes a lot of sense. A really good example of that um in the novel

speculation bucket of the three archetypes is Poly Market, right? So I think I imagine all of you have heard of it, all of you have used it. Poly Market wasn't brand new. It wasn't a new idea. Um there had been previous attempts at prediction markets, but it got the timing right. it got the uh infrastructure right like all these contracts I don't know if you know this but all these contracts are built uh with NFTs so technically like NFT summer may have died but NFTs are still a part of what I think is the biggest app in crypto uh and it allows you for those who haven't used it allows you to speculate on things that are going on in the real world it became the number one app in America in the news sector around the election and allowed you to speculate on who was going to win the

election people were going there to find out like the live results result of that speculation which allowed them to like call the American election before it was even fully called on like a lot of the news outlets. Um, and yeah, this is a great example of how, you know, you can speculate in a novel way. It's intellectually stimulating, but it's also not like super brand new, right? They built something that looks great that was a previous idea and again, great artist steal. Um, also within the novel speculation is something that's been built from the poly market idea. I know you're a big fan of Ponder. I'll pass it back to you. Yeah, it's a just a completely different kind of prediction market, but Ponder is a smallcale prediction market on Farcaster where essentially the whole point of it is to,

you know, you're presented with an option. Let's say what's the best primary color, red, blue or yellow. And your bet is to or the strategy there is to guess or predict what everyone else will say. So, you're essentially looking for the majority's answer. And I really like ponder. I think you know I would never have pictured myself as a daily forecaster user 3 4 months ago. Now I am. I attribute it all to Ponder really because they have made this speculative game which doesn't feel like speculation almost. I don't know. There's it's not a new fairly launched memecoin. As I said it's not a new form of perves. It

doesn't feel over financialized. It really just feels like a quick sort of daily poll where you're relying on your intuition to figure out, you know, what the majority will answer for these questions. There's a wide variety. You know, as you can see on the screen, people ask anything. You know, a big one which caused a bit of controversy was like who's going to win the war in uh Ukraine or um like are political assassinations valid at certain points, right? And it's just interesting to see what people think everyone else will pick. Um, and it's also really low stakes bets, right? You can only bet up to $10, as low as 50 cents. Payouts are also pretty small. They can range from like a cent to $40 depending on the market and the divisiveness of it. But

overall, I think it's a really shiny example of novel speculation in a way that does not feel overly financialized and exhaustive to the user. You said we weren't going to get political and you just went and brought up politics again. Has anybody used Do do y'all know what Farcaster is when we bring up Farcaster? Show of hands. Okay, about half. Nice. Okay, I won't go into too much detail about what it is, but again, it's uh you know, combining social, financial, something fun, something mobile. This isn't entirely novel. It's novel speculation, but it's not entirely novel, right? like Poly Market was really similar, but this is using a similar idea and building it into Farcaster, which is new infrastructure that allows it to be even more social and allows the transactions to happen

really quickly. Um, and then the last bucket, the last archetype is group play. Uh, another show of hands. Has anybody played Crypto the Game? Okay, we've got one. Nice. Okay, good. I will explain this one then. So, Crypto the Game is like Survivor U, but it's gone online. So, you uh put in I think it was 0.1 ETH to join the game. that goes into the vaults, which is the prize. It was 150k prize for this season, which was season 3. Uh, and you get split up into tribes um at the beginning of the game. And each day is a different contest that you try to, you know, solve or you compete in as a team.

And the winner is immune for that day. The loser has to vote out players on their team. And so every day a bunch of players get voted out until the last day where all those folks, if you know Survivor, all the folks that have been voted out are then on the jury and then they vote for who the winner is. Um, and like Poly Market and Ponder, these aren't this isn't a brand new idea. It uses infrastructure in crypto, right? There are NFTTS as your um introduction as like your your path to be in the game. It uses USDC to pay. Um, and then there's like crypto games that make it crypto, but it really is just Survivor and it's gone online. So, again, using a good idea, taking it into a different realm, a different like use case now that the infrastructure is here. And

it's fun, right? Like all these teams go into separate Telegram groups. They compete with each other. They collaborate. You don't know who's your friend, who's your foe. You don't know if you're going to get backstabbed that day or if your team is like telling the truth that they're not going to vote for you. Uh, and it's it's a blast. It's mobile and it's a blast. Uh, highly recommend if you want to do something that takes up your entire life for 10 days. Uh, and then the last piece, the last group play um example. Okay. Has anybody used PVP trade? Nice. We've got one. Okay. Good, good, good. We're talking about new apps. Okay. So, um, you can long and short trades with your friends and foes. Kind of like crypto the game. You go into a telegram chat with all of your friends and what you

see on the right are a bunch of different options of what you can do. Um they use hyperlquid as um you know the liquidity and all the tokens that you can find and you can long or you can short or you can copy trade, you can counter trade. You can see some of David's trades that uh didn't go so well. He lost I think like just over $2 here. Uh but it's it's uh like the visuals are great, right? like you can see that um you know the long that you just opened is either up or down and you can close it and you can see like what your friends have done and you can copy them and there's a leaderboard right so you can like find out who's made the best trades and again this is combining you know new infrastructure hyperl's pretty new like everybody using telegram

is fairly new but it's using like old activities that we've done right like we've been longing and shorting well but I don't know if we've all been longing and shorting I hope you haven't been longing shorting for a long time, but we've all been trading for a long time, and this just took those ideas and made it something new and something social and something mobile and something fun. Yeah. And it really also, just to add one point on to uh Nick's summary, is that it shows, you know, obviously I feel like there's a lot of uh annoyance with, you know, people being like, "Oh, I'm going long and then shorting." Especially like sort of larger capital players. And this just really puts it all out in public. And despite the name, it's a pretty sort of player versus environment uh experience

because, you know, with everyone showcasing their trades all the time, it just breathes an atmosphere in these chats of why am I doing this? I'm showing this to you. Obviously, I'll talk about it. And it's just a much nicer air towards trading than, you know, sort of being locked into your 18 different monitors on your own. Um, and it's you versus the world. Yeah, that's a good point. I think, you know, some of the big takeaways, we've talked about the buckets, the archetypes. Some of the big takeaways for me is like borrow some of this stuff. Like it like you don't have to come up with something brand new. It doesn't have to just be like brand new tech infrastructure. Like if you're building apps or if you're marketing apps, use some of the ideas that you've seen out there and definitely like use these products. Like

all these ideas have built from past ideas because they're in the arena. they're trying uh new things and they're learning like what works and what doesn't work personally and then usually that's a pretty good sign of what's going to work for all the other users out there. Yeah. Uh to wrap that up, I think that's a pretty apt summary. Um definitely please take from these, take from the archetypes, know the catalysts, those will really help you. And we have about three little less minutes left. So if anyone has any questions, please um you know feel free to raise your hand and we will answer.

Yeah. Any questions out there? Anything? You see one? Okay. Totally. You have an answer. On these apps, can any tokenized vehicle be, traded, used, commented? I mean, is it open to all tokens on these apps like Ponder? Which app are you referring to? I mean, anyway, it's uh Oh, Ponder. We um we tokenize sovereign bonds and we're looking for new ways to bring them into the sphere. And what some of these apps seem to be a good or platforms seem to be good like ponder and pol would

they take financially like stable bonds? Uh some maybe you know like if you get on hyperlquid then those we're on hyperlquid great then it would be on PVP trade I imagine be on axiom maybe purity is it if they're on salana then you can use lemonrop I don't think poly market is relevant but yeah then it would make sense for lemonrop I think my one piece of advice is reach out to them see if it makes sense you know there's always a good opportunity to make a new connection and then find out what you need to change or what you need to offer to get onto to these apps and maybe you what you learn is that they don't have the capability of offering your app and then boom there's a new idea for you

build an app where you know something like PVP trade happens but within the products that you have so you would reach out to hyper yeah I'd reach out to all of them can't hurt yeah send a DM send an email they might not get back to you but um and then and then try the apps see if you if you can find those tokens and if you see them there already which I think you would for you know PvP trade and and lemon drop. Then voila. Cool. Thanks. Yes, we have uh one more here. Hey, aside from uh aside from Poly Market, you know, it's been 15 years, trillions of dollars invested in all

this, aside from Poly Market, which which does seem to have at least some function. Is this not a bit depressing to you that after 15 years we're talking here about like oh maybe you can click on this poll in the morning or like hey this thing will clear your your wallet? Uh it's isn't that a bit sad on some level? You want? Not personally. I don't know. I think it just depends on you know your uh time horizon, your scale where you're coming from. I don't I think these are just apps that are like as someone who grew up on the internet um and may not have the sort of same you know I don't know just viewpoint overall I feel like particularly around like

crypto I think there's a lot of more unique ways to you know sort of coordinate and also just experience the internet online also make some money just in a you know sort of passive way yes you know these apps aren't going to save thousands of lives But I do think they're still adding value and I think a lot especially in this day and age. There's a lot to be said about bringing people together and bringing joy to things that people are already doing on the internet. And I think a lot of these apps are very successful in that. Um yeah, and I think the internet is going to continue to get a bit more stale. Um and it's good to sort of, you know, have the mic pass to Nick so you can finish up the answer. Uh okay, just quick

because I know we have like like 10 more seconds, but I you know we do have some apps that are really successful like Bitcoin as a store of value is taking off and that is tech technically an application. Uh stable coins are truly going to change a lot of things over the next like 10 years and we're already seeing that and that's worth you know spending a lot of money on and then poly market is a great example. there going to be others, but yes, it's sad that we don't have like a thousand new apps that are all really exciting, but what you see in tech is that like there are maybe like two or three that really make sense and it was worth all the different attempts that failed. Uh, and it's hard to be in the midst of all those failures, but what you get at the end

are applications that really make a lot of sense. Um, but yeah, if you want to find us online, those are our uh X accounts. And thanks y'all. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much for speakers and for asking the questions.