DAPPCON 2019: Build (d)apps People Want - Romano Recuero (OpenZeppelin)

Transcript

hi everyone thank you for being here so early so it's really good to be here at that point where we are all excited to bring this and drys applications and crypto to to everyone to everyone in the world so this is what this talk is gonna be about it's gonna be about how do we build the apps that people want and I'm gonna start a little bit but taking a stock Oh at where we are at right now how have we done so far and the truth is we haven't done so great so far we with sac a bit and the reason is and two years ago even we were invited to this great party where the music was playing the wine was flowing there were so many I cos if the money was flowing around and every ICO that appear can fulfill

their racing goals and there was a few every month and it looked like the party and the dream was never gone I am but of course like everything else in life it eventually ended and if you compute the numbers after all the ICO craze they were more than two thousand and two hundred ICS that were completed and more than 21 billion dollars were raised and what can we show for after all this we have accepted zero applications with more than 5,000 vu this is really bad for comparison and the top mobile application has more than 50 million BAU that's like a four orders of magnitude difference we need to do better and where did all the money go your guess is as good as mine but if after 21 billion

dollars we cannot create a single non single application this next there is a sign that we need to do better so in in summary we suck but that's okay because when you are working with new technologies is normal to fail you are innovating you're at the top of the sphere and we're gonna see how this happened before with all the technological cycles with other paradigms example this is how the web look in 2000 and even if the web is starting in the 1980s it wasn't until the 2000 when it hit consumer adoption and around that time 2000 everyone wanted to put everything on the web pads books food everything

so you see company like Webvan best calm cosmo that devaluation triple and quadruple quadruple over a period of six months because they just got double with double w on their on their website so again this party eventually ended and after the dot-com bust more than five trillion dollars were lost in this bubble and around fifty percent of the companies that were alive died so there are a couple lessons that we can learn from this web three one is that when you're working on new technology is normal at expectations get ahead of actual value everyone gets excited there is a lot of capital that's normal and the other one is like the amount of money raised

doesn't equal success in fact this is a really poor metric about now let's look at another technology beer beer has been o around for a while but it's actually always two years away from us it has been around for more than 30 years and the listen the lesson from VR is that the last five percent is always the harvest we tend to underestimate how long is gonna take us to close that 5% because we are for example they're like seven million capsules right now in the market but the average playtime is not longer than 20 minutes so it's like really really short and it's because of the pain that the user needs to go through to a new experience so now that we have looked at a couple different

paradigms technological cycles before let's generalize a little bit and thinking about the fing work that Carlota Perez created that is called the search cycle basically says for everything knowledge it is like a Big Bang moment that you can think the Big Bang white paper for crypto that the start is a start stop then a few years later there is another Big Bang that creates that triggers installation phase in our case that can be aetherium or even the beginning of the IC o---- so the installation phase can last 20 to 30 years and we are in it right now this is the period where there is a lot of creative destruction we need to try a lot of things because they are not proven business models to follow there

are a lot of bubbles because the result of capital deployed around but few things actually work and on top of it you are competing with the previous technology that is at the top that is mature in our cases does the cloud that's web does mobile eventually though this installation phase will end and we will get into the deployment phase for the actual capital produces value and they investors get the return the consumers get to get to enjoy the benefits of the technology and the technology matures enough to be quite a spread the web cloud and mobile again in the deployment phase so where are we at with Twitter right now there is another mental model that we can use from Gartner that is really similar and

overlaps the previous one that is the hype cycle every technology goes through a hype cycle that looks like this it just Asus no but then expectations get ahead of themselves and then they go to this peak and then there is a cross or crypto winter in our case and then eventually it will get to the plateau of productivity according to Gartner we are just after the crash a little bit one two years wait but we are like five to ten years away from getting to this plateau of productivity again mobile cloud or or or web they are already in the plateau of relativity so we are in this desert and is nothing is gonna feel easy and nothing is gonna feel right

because there are no business models that work so far there are no gurus to listen to and there are no companies to copy yet so how how do we cross it another useful mental model from Seth Godin is to see this desert thus Abib the deepest what separates the beginner slack from real mastery is the series of obstacles that we need to overcome to get to the promised land so how do we cross it as fast as fast as possible by doing two things first building things people want and then hiding all the technical complexity the first one my son familiar for you is the slogan from Y Combinator I used to work at Y

Combinator for a couple years and there they communicate a simple idea to entrepreneurs that is really powerful there are only two things that matter coding creating product and talking to users and the faster you can do both the more you can learn because the startups are a game of learning and you need to close that thing but look and make and make it as short as possible because users in the end don't care about the technology don't care about how it's done they just care about how they can use an application a product to solve in their daily progress their daily needs so it's really important that you ask yourself why why are you using blocks as this we're customers to your co-workers to your partners the answer cannot be because is the technology of the day

that's really cool and it's gonna solve everything undef initely it cannot be that is decentralized because remember if is useless and is decentralized it's still useless and you're only differentiation cannot be that you have tiptoe to the name so if it the books get to pet it of crypto games that cannot read and that reminds me a lot that solitude to the web again you know like we have test.com and at that time just by adding www or web to something like web ban double or triple devaluation yeah and around this time some of these produce like web ban eventually work like Amazon made it work

but they didn't work because they were on the web they work because they created new business model and they improve the customer experience quite a bit for example Amazon they put books on the web but they succeeded because they let shoppers shop from they come from their couch happening Chris catalog - you're full of orders of magnitude higher and then also say hey are you part of Amazon Prime you get the book the next day for free that's a crazy value proposition this way we need to think along the same lines so how will find value with this Moodle or how we use it to create something new there is a good mental model that is think about the about the ways that you can use the technology to unlock something new what

the script what does this imply suffocation give us that wasn't possible before and one of the themes to give us is tokens tokens are our money now with Vito you can financial eyes for securitize any asset both offline are online you can see how defy for example is using this in the right way another good thing does it'll only give us is an open development platform I used to work up singing as well and we develop games like Farmville for for Facebook then one night Facebook changed everything and then it killed half of

the companies working in the space and eventually drop all of our revenue stuff so this is not a good place to be cause stress by contrast on etherium everything is open everything is calm possible so nobody's gonna change the rules of the game finally privacy we can finally give the data to the users and don't don't forget that the users may not necessarily care about rights they care about what you do with it in summary we need to be something at least 10 times cheaper ten times faster for something new that they couldn't do before ad with the sample from a previous paradigm is club East drop box by the time Dropbox appear nobody

understood understood the cloud but everyone was hiding the cloud Club bees love that so Dropbox instead of saying oh we're cloud storage we're gonna make it so much easier what they do is hey you can now access all your files from your iPad from your phone and from your computer and we're also gonna make sure that you never lose it that's a really good value proposition that we communicated without saying anything on the club so in our case we're starting to see some green sprouts in define for example you can give you a traitor you can either if you wanna open a leveraged loan that is basically using some part of your blood data because you

wanna grow 4 X 5 X nuke angle it is not route and it alone and it alone or you can use define and get alone in five minutes that's 10 times faster that the usual they are doing it the right way and they are finding a small total market fit within that niche the other thing we need to do to build things people want is kinda technical complexity again view system don't care about house though they just care about what's the value they get and honestly right now using an innocent life application is similar to visibility you get this application with no monsters or whatever you press a button and then the Fox appeals and then you need to install the parks then you need to sign up then you need to go to an exchange say money

back to the Fox you go back to the game you click this a transaction with he buries a confirmation window then you click yes then finally you can click the button you wait for 3 minutes and then finally you enter the game this is really painful so it's not a surprise that the CEO of diaper loves what he was working on cryptokey B's mentioned that they have a ninety nine percent drop off in the panel when they trigger me Thomas this is crazy this means that just one out of a hundred users get to use the game and erroneous user onboarding and user experience we are really happy to

announce that in the last two weeks we have created gas station network is on mainland along with taboo key and the meta cartel and the gas station Alliance and within foundation gas station network is a system to help your application behave like any other normal web application your user going to use meta mas give me certain me to go to coinbase Eunice's can just use the app normally and you can assume the transaction cost of your users as part of your customer acquisition cost and you can hide it some of my co-workers here we're gonna have a worship above these tomorrow or Friday and if you wanna know more please go back so I want to finish with some good news garner estimates that

blockchain is gonna create a substantial amount of value more than 100 centipoid billion by 2025 and more than 3 trillion by 2030 but the only way we can start capturing this value is it we start sucking lists and we can do that by offering the good of the blockchain and hiding the bad energy and this is the only thing we can build the apps that people work thank you I'm just curious to know how some of these platforms like gas station network are attacking like DDoS and like civil resistance yeah basically it's based on checks and balances that keep everything like a

like a perfect thank you any more questions ok so when you're saying we should hide the complexity I sometimes have the impression that it's rather easy to try the complexity of the DEP itself but not the complexity of having to deal with cryptocurrency so when people use the DEP and earn some reward and token somehow there's still a problem that they have to exchange two tokens for something that can be exchangeable on aa on a bigger exchange

for for fiat money then cash it out so maybe it's would it be better to to build the apps that hold their the tokens of the users in custody and then offer maybe some kind of automatic pay out in fiat where where the tokens are to make it medically exchange I mean I know it it does contradict the the idea behind blockchain technology but would that be would that make it easier for for user adoption yeah that's a really good point I would like to start by saying that in the end it depends on the pain you are solving because the greater the greater the pain the users are gonna

go through more folks to they are gonna be able to be standing if any penny for example you solve something that they did that they need therapy for example at the beginning everyone use Craigslist because there was another way to buy furniture even it was difficult to use and so on so it's really good to to figure out what are your friends that are you bring a vitamin are you offering a painkiller if you're offering vitamins I think it's really good to hide the complexity as much as we talk if you're offering a painkiller just give them as much value as we mentioned yeah we are brands are helping useless even if you help users make money they are gonna adopt it you

know it's like uber Airbnb all this new business model appear 15 years after they first mainstream over up here alright here we are pyridine just like the business models are finally figured out how to monetize the best work up here 1515 just like this right so in the same way with with us the best way we can think of this is like how would tell all the people make money that they cannot do right now and then I think it's gonna take 5 to 10 years I'm sorry I didn't hear you talk from the very beginning bet him what you said in one of the last slides that 99% of

the users drop off when presented with Smita masks this is also something we experienced and we're a real estate organization platform and even though we think the real estate part is the most difficult part for most people it's actually meta mask so what do you recommend instead I mean there are many platforms like up vest for example as a startup from Berlin you take abstract this into a mid-layer but what in your opinion what's what's your recommendation what platforms should do there are many there are many alternatives and in depends on your use case for example there are some alternatives but you can just store encrypted keys on your backing and this offer offer the functionality to your

users behind a normal password I for example darm out porta scab then we also have things like a station network that is more decentralized that can work better better for applications that have a lot of transactions but not a lot of high value for example it would be great for games and consumer applications but not so great for defy in their case or real estate I think securities is probably their most importance and the amount of demand that is securing the system is high so there are different traders for existing but I think being aware of all of them and just choosing the right one for for your approach but this place again gas station network and decentralize the transaction system or you can use something like Europe your own backing or just where you store the keys

encrypted behind a normal user name and password or you can use something like Fortis that they do this way but you know that's that's not a lot I mean there's a new legislation the AML 5 directive which doesn't allow you to start a private keys of the users but just things up [Music] Thank You Dora [Applause]