DappCon 2023: Getting Consumer Adoption For Web3 Apps - Eric Tang

Transcript

thanks everyone for being here uh my name is Eric tang and I am the co-founder and CTO at live Pier um before I um before I start my um presentation I'm curious to hear Out In This Crowd how many people will consider themselves as a developer or a builder of some kind raise your hand cool um and investors okay cool all right thank you for for sharing that so um you know today I want to talk about getting consumer adoption for web three applications right which is something that's that's really near and

dear to my heart um a little background of myself I've been working in the tech industry for um over a decade at this point um started my career in kind of the New York Tech start uh Tech ecosystem I started a company called hyper public uh back in 2010 10 and and it was acquired by Groupon which at that time was the fastest growing startup in history uh so kind of saw how a consumer application um what what happens to a consumer application when they're going through this like hyper growth right obviously you know there were a lot of issues that happened with Groupon so also learn a lot of lessons at that time um after that I uh I started a company

called wildcard uh wild card was when you know kind of uh the App Store was just getting established and was just becoming popular uh and it was a it was a news aggregator app and it was one of the feature one of the top apps in the App Store in the year 2015 um again kind of seeing how consumers adopt these applications and and what what is necessary to kind of propel them to the next level uh and in 2016 uh I started working on you know open source projects in the ethereum ecosystem and working uh quite closely with the ethereum foundation um building uh kind of distributed and decentralized infrastructure uh trying

to enable video streaming uh and and you know that's kind of where life per is born and it's been about seven years since we've been building this decentralized video streaming infrastructure right but you know getting back to the topic today right I want to talk a little bit about hurdles of uh consumer ad option for decentralized applications um how to remove them uh I want to talk about uh I want to relate that and connect that to kind of onchain media and onchain video video and um provide some perspective and why I think that can be a tool for introducing adoption to life p u to to kind of the web 3 consumer applications

uh and at the same time um share some active experimentations that are happening right now cool so let's look at the hurdles first digging into um some past hurdles that we have seen in you know in the last um five to six years right since since we started really working together as a community on on ethereum um back in the day you know W wallet wallet adoption was a big problem right when we talk about this in the community all the time it's very hard to use wallets most consumers will not touch a wallet it's too complicated for them um having your money in the wallet and having to sign transactions for for

everything for every time that you need to touch the blockchain is too difficult and and too risk uh too risky right so all of these things make uh the wallet interface not a not a good a huge hurdle for for onboarding everyday consumers um the good news is we now have a pretty good solution even though still theoretical and still being imp implemented um I really I've been really seeing a lot of progress in this area in the past year or so ever since you know ERC 4337 was introduced right and and now there are many companies building in this space there are many tools that have taken some shortcuts and created

great Solutions right things like privy where it allows a user to sign up to an application with just email and password something that they're very very familiar with but then in the background um allowing an application to kind of manage a hot wallet uh and but still try to try to preserve some of the decentralization p uh aspects through kind of delegated signing and things like that um so I would say that problem will be solved in the next year or so um there was another problem that we had to face which was Network congestion right another pretty famous problem here on the left we have a graph of um the amount of pending transactions in the

ethereum men pool when crypto kitties was launched I think that was 2018 2017 in that time frame um for days the ethereum network was essentially unusable right there were so many transactions backlogged if you wanted to you know put in a transaction it take hours to confirm right or sometimes you just eventually it would just like get kicked out of the mle um but again we've come a long way from that period the foundation and and lots of core team members and and um and also other lots of independent teams have been working on scalability solutions to today I would say if you look at this landscape and this ecosystem of all the different

scalability solutions for ethereum um we are at a place where the the infrastructure is able to handle the throughput of a consumer facing scaled applications right a really good example recently is you know during the base launch um there was an application called FR Tech uh that that that launched and you know there was a very interesting uh kind of financial speculative component in that app and it drew in a lot of attention right so that's act it's very similar um to how um to how the crypto Kitty project launched in in the early days but this time you know the base blockchain didn't

even make a blip right it just kept on trugging right we didn't see any gas spikes it was very cheap to to you know put in transactions over that period of time right a really good um you know just a really good milestone for us as a community to hit um and I would say you know this it continues to get better um another problem right we've all know like crypto has had um challenge in the public in the Public's eyes right so you know they during the bull market times people think it's speculative and then during the win during crypto winter right this is a recent uh art um issue from The Economist um basically painting the picture that you know crypto is is kind

of done there's a downfall of crypto uh but the interesting thing is that um the the actual usage of blockchain based application is actually quite different from the public perception that you might see in the news in the media right so on the right we see uh kind of the number of the number of active wallets on the ethereum main net um in the past like 5 years is you see that you know it dipped a little bit but not like a downfall like uh not definitely definitely not in the trajectory that the meteors are going downwards in in in the in the cover of The Economist right and in fact if you count all the layer all the scale all the layer two

blockchains in this time frame you will see that the number of active wallets has only increased over time time right CU there are more l2s being launched every new L2 it brought in this new community of users so so the usage is actually growing um the number of users are actually growing despite the the bad press right so so what what is our next biggest challenge well I would argue that the next biggest challenge for the for our ecosystem is just like any other new application that needs to go through which is user retention and user growth right it's when Facebook launched in at first they had to go through that period when

Snapchat launched um during they had to go through that period it's finding out how to grow user base in a very sustainable way and in a very cheap way right so so I want to share just some like very high level metrics that people use in the traditional kind of web 2 world to track user growth right one is customer retention rate right so it's U um you can track this based on cohorts of users right so you can cut it for example for two for every two weeks you create a cohort of users and you keep track of how how many of them stay in stay in continue use engaging with the application over a period of time um so what you what you want to see is the

green curve which is uh people call it a smile right which means you know at the beginning some users fall off but over time you actually see the number of engaged users increasing a little bit right so you know some people that fall off may come back in in later weeks um but I I'd say crypto right now web 3 right now in general we're kind of in the flat or declining curve right it's it's often times people uh kind of use and use the apps and then they you know they stop using it um not a lot of people get re-engaged and come back to the applications uh and that's something that we can all work on the other thing is it's called viral Cod coefficient

right so this is um basically the number that um that's related to kind of how many new users each uh how many more new users each new user bring with them right so uh think of a traditional example of like if you sign up for a any kind of popular social app today one of the first things that they ask you to do is to invite your friends right and the more friends you invite the higher viral coefficient it becomes because every new user they get they get exponential more users and that grows right so so here's a pretty interesting chart right you see the the Orange is a viral coefficient of 1.2 um and then the the red is a viral

coefficient of one and then the um the the the blue is a viral coefficient of of 08 like below one right you see small difference over time in in the v viral coefficient actually makes a big difference in terms of total users so that means every little change that you can make in your app that increases the viral coefficient will dramatically increase the number of users that you get in your application and that's the same for a whole ecosystem right so in order to achieve those better numbers we need tools to engage users right so whether it's for online education or social use

cases Fitness Music Entertainment like these are you know applications that people use on a day-to-day basis these are the consumer applications that we that we see today and these are the new consumer applications that we want to build in web 3 right we need tools to engage these users and to pull them into web 3 and to keep them here um and and here is where onchain media comes in um my perspective is that media and content is going to be the main driver for users everyday Mass consumers to come into the web 3 space and stay here people revolve around content content is the best way to drive

usage and engage users um and and to touch on video a little bit why do I think video is important well about 80% of the traffic on the internet today is video content so it's very important for us to get this right in order to get the mass to get the mass consumers to come and adopt this new technology right so to touch on and to touch on onchain media and what that actually means right what what is an onchain media what is an onchain video well let's look at the um let's look at before blockchain right before blockchain if I have to publish a piece of media if I a piece of video I have to first upload it into a website into an

application and as soon as I do that that piece of media is now constrained by that application right I upload my video to YouTube I upload my video to to to um Instagram whatever it is as soon as I do that I can only do the things that those application allow me to do with my video um and that's very constraining I'm playing by other people's rules in the blockchain um that gets reversed right me as the creator of the video I first published that video onto the blockchain create a record on chain and I use decentralized content networks to distribute that content into all the different applications that are built on top of the blockchain what that allows

me to do is to have a lot more control uh using the blockchain as a public Ledger not only for financial information but also for media and content um so that I can have actual proper content ownership and actual proper access control and Rights Management for the content and that will create a much better economic relationship between the user users and the platforms right so there are there are a number of different uh technical concept that I will not get get into for now uh I actually gave a uh gave a work technical Workshop earlier today um and and it's recorded So I I absolutely recommend going to check that out uh and or if you can uh if you are interested

in uh any of these Concepts um come and uh come and find me afterwards happy to talk about that um live here is very actively working in all of these different areas uh especially related to verifiable ownership verification uh verifiability of video streaming in general uh and and in these like censorship resistant and and and also content mon uh monetization and moderation uh areas cool so um now I want to share some active experiments that are happening right we talked a lot about Concepts and and and abstractions uh but there's actually a lot of things that are happening in this this space right now today in onchain

media uh one of the most recent experiments is is um onchain Summer Stories so um as you probably all know um coinbase recently launched their al2 blockchain called base um this was back in July I think and in order to bring a new community of users into this ecosystem they created this campaign called onchain Summer right and this whole idea and and the slogan is um they want to bring as many people onchain as they can um and one of the cornerstones of this campaign was onchain Summer Stories um and so what is it it's 20 it's a 23-day interview series with Jesse poock who was a creator of of Bas

uh and he was in he was interviewing uh different builders in the Basse ecosystem of course these live streams these were live streamed empowered by life pier and all of these live streams were syndicated to other social social channels so um you know places like Twitter or or YouTube right places where um base and coinbase already has an audience um there was a very uh clear call to action for each day U for the live stream which is to go mint the daily nft drop right so for every interview they coupled that with nft mint just open addition kind of um you know memorabilia type of um type of nment um and and just with that it

became a Cornerstone um of a successful Community onboarding campaign for Bas to the point that in August base became the most profitable L2 uh in the entire ethereum ecosystem more profitable than arbitra more profitable than uh than optimism that who have been around for a long time right so all of that came because they used um media and video as a tool to really engage with the community and got a lot of viral uh viral content going uh and got a lot of people really engaged when people see something that they can feel that is real that they can connect with they take the action and there was

a very high uh conversion rate for people who who watch the content to people who go then mint the nfts yeah another example I want to point out is the the lens Universe right lot you're probably familiar lens is a social out social protocol um there are many applications that are built on top of the same graph right so here's my profile in lens tube which is a YouTube Style app my same profile in lenser which is a Twitter style uh feed based app my same profile in diverse HQ which is a Reddit style discussion forum uh app my same profile in orb which is a primarily mobile Centric Community Based

applic a right so this is really this creates this really interesting Network effect where users can choose different tools of different purposes but interacting with the same social graph and then those social graphs are publishing content right so currently lens has about you know 100K users um hundreds of hundreds of projects in the space about 5 500,000 um Publications but the most interesting data is that there's been $350,000 of Creator Revenue that's been generated in the ecosystem and that's I think a lot due to the fact that there's this uh great Network effect that happens that all enabled by onchain media uh quickly another example um Zora

right you you probably all familiar with Zora um it's a it's a nft Marketplace um focused on open addition nft mints um in the last couple of years they've minted over 3.8 million nfts uh there's been 3.8 million nft mint actions that have happened way more than any other uh nft Pro uh nft platforms U millions dollar Mill millions of dollar in revenue generated by this platform because for every Min they take a couple dollars of transaction fee um to the point they started launching their own L2 and you know doing new experiments in Revenue split with creators so this all leads us to this kind of brand new world of new Financial Primitives for onchain media

and that's where I think blockchain and web 3 and media really converges is now we get to create these new business models now that media is starting to be on chain right so I list out a few sponsorships content promotion another way to say advertising subscriptions tipping membership crowdfunding and decentralized creative creative entities right so all of these things are being experimented and and I think it's a really good time for for the builders in the space to to start really um building in this area because there will be um there will be huge applications that come out of this that will be much bigger than you know today's social networks um yeah thank you for uh thank

you for being here I can uh answer some questions thank you so much Eric are there any questions here's one question yeah maybe a bit of a stretch but um do you um are you aware of like existing social media platforms considering maybe in some form integrating uh what Life beer is offering to yeah provide uh extra communities like scaling it

beyond what we currently have yeah yeah there I think there's like a life Pier specific answer and then there's is's a more General like web 3 answer right um for web for life pure absolutely in fact more than half of the usage on the live pier network right now comes from the traditional um video streaming world not the web 3 world uh and that's that's just because live Pier is able to you know we've been building this up for seven years at this point now there's a really scalable and performant video streaming infrastructure that's 80% cheaper than Amazon right so a lot of people are switching over just because you know the the the economic environment is bad people need to save cost uh and and now a lot of applications are trying to figure out

how they can cut video infrastructure cost which is often times a big item on their you know on their on their uh balance sheet right so uh people are switching over to life pure a lot of time just for that reason um in terms of traditional video uh traditional social applications adopting these like new web 3 Concepts um I am starting to see some uh one example is uh is a recent um application that we started working with called Minds uh Minds is a is a social app that's been around for I'd say seven or eight years right so when they first started there I guess Bitcoin was around but you know like they weren't using Bitcoin that Bitcoin was also not usable

by by uh social media application at that point so they started more as a kind of a um cultural uh countercurrent to the big social media platforms like um like Facebook right so they had different content moderation policies they were less politically charged they were less you know left left leaning and there were a lot more um about um encouraging debates uh in um in these communities so so there's this really vibrant and interesting Community as as the decentralized tech space has grown and and as the technology has gotten um uh more usable um mind started in um integrating with different

decentralized Tech um uh Technologies because at the core they have a lot of alignment with what their user want and what what decentralized tech enable right so um so for example I think they recently um integrated with nost which is a you know like a Bitcoin heavy um social protocol uh I almost see it as like the the the you know the torch carrier for activity Pub uh in a bit uh and and of course they've also uh integrated with live Pier for for live streaming yeah all right I I see there's another question but unfortunately we have

another speaker being lined up so um I think Eric would be happy to take this question offline um and if there is any other question obviously the same applies so give it up again for Eric thank you very much for having you thank you