Better onboarding UX via micro on-ramps from Web 2.0 to web3

Transcript

foreign [Music] thanks for coming on the last day I didn't expect uh so many people to to be hanging around on a Thursday afternoon but um yeah my name is Justin I'm here to give a quick talk uh around like um ux user experience in crypto I think uh it's worth differentiating a little bit uh between like crypto UI ux and like what I want to talk about in terms of user experience um I think crypto UI ux today for enthusiasts it's obviously very

interesting and cool but um it can be uh I think it comes oftentimes from a developer first mindset which leads to very you know undelightful well not necessarily undelightful but complicated kind of user experiences which I think those of us who have been in this space we accept that but at the same time like for wider adoption and stuff like that kind of creates a lot of friction um so this is something that we work on on my team at my company at Quigley and I thought it would be an interesting thing I mean 15 minutes isn't very long but I thought it'd be like an interesting thing to kind of like raise and some of the thoughts we think about it as we make our own decisions around the processes and everything

um so real quickly um before I jump in uh I want to give a quick self intro again my name is Justin I'm based here in Paris I've actually I'm not French as you can probably tell but I've been here for um this is year 11 which is every time I say that is a very shocking thing but I came in 2013 which is also when I bought my first Bitcoin someone just invoiced me on PayPal and I paid I made a hundred dollars and he sent me the keys and so yeah I mean if I ever leave France at least I will have this memory of Paris buying a Bitcoin um I started my career in tradfi uh working in corporate finance in Asia in

Japan and Korea before moving into Tech with startups e-commerce and SAS I got into crypto honestly mainly for speculation um I think I'm pretty comfortable to say that but at the same time uh obviously like the sort of cross-border nature of the technology is extremely interesting for me having kind of lived overseas in in multiple countries over the past uh almost couple decades now um yeah it's it's an extremely interesting way to transfer value at the least right I think if there's any sentiment or idea of product Market fit in crypto it's like cross-border remittances at the least at the minimum we can say I'm one of the co-founders of

Quigley and um yeah we're a distributed team but a couple of us are here based in Paris and it's always a pleasure to speak at HCC um so from to kind of set the stage a little bit around the context of what what I want to talk about we look at crypto from like a future of work perspective as well as the web 3 perspective I know for a lot of people they're probably kind of sick of hearing about future of work in crypto but um it just makes a lot of sense for us because you know the nature of work today is increasingly decentralized permissionless and digital um all of us not even in the crypto the blockchain sense like we're working

online we're collaborating through like software web software internet software and you would think that aligns quite well with the sort of infrastructure the technology that's being built in web3 in crypto right um just in terms of like Finance we can pick one aspect of that like compensation you can pay people in tokens um no matter where they're based like permissionlessly if you want um in terms of uh identity and credentials nft on-chain verification that kind of stuff is like perfect when you're working digitally maybe increasingly more anonymously so again you would think that there's an

extremely good fit alignment in the technology here for web3 to really impact the future of work um the truth is however uh like public perception of web3 and crypto is and not just public perception I think user experience which is kind of the subject I want to approach is really not there yet um if you just do a quick search of web 3 and crypto across like any of the major like Publications like news outlets out there today like Bloomberg New York Times Washington Post BBC um I'm not cherry picking bad stuff this is like literally like the pit the search results that hit up when you look

at crypto and whip three so um I mean if we ourselves have not really defined what web3 is and if we ourselves are still kind of struggling to um as early adopters I mean are still kind of struggling to like set that set those standards and set any kind of like stable um stable software stable workflow stable like use of any of these protocols then um how can we expect the sort of good stuff around web3 like identity credentials and stuff like that to trickle down to the wider internet user audience um it doesn't help I think when like it's interesting I think if we believe

this to be true there's like 420 million people who hold crypto I'm imagining that it includes like Sexes as well that's like less than six percent of the world today if you think about internet penetration which has done like a lot for collaboration a lot for like digital native work and stuff like that I think it's something like close to almost 80 it's like 75 or something like that if people are online they're doing stuff online um and so if you think about of that percentage how many are actually just even holding crypto it's still pretty low um and then if you look at the average user or average like on Gemini for example this is where I got these stats the average user on Gemini it's purely for speculation for trading so

um it's going to be really hard to shift over to the cool like collaborative stuff if even the currency stuff is still like really based around speculation around trading which isn't a problem in itself but again like to move that to shift that user experience to more kind of application layer stuff like we need to move Beyond like the currency kind of aspects of those things um it's interesting if you compare it to like what non-crypto when I say non-native here I mean like what non-crypto people do on the internet again like 75 of the world is online but they're watching movies they're paying bills they're even doing Financial stuff they're doing online education things

like that none of it really needs blockchain none of it really needs like um decentralization or anything so um how do we bridge that Gap how do we how do we make them kind of realize I mean it's clear at the least that they're not valuing permission lists like applications they're not really valuing decentralization and that in itself we shouldn't criticize people for not understanding that right I think it's it's normally like the demand in the market that sets how things are built how products are are sold and things like that and so um it's just really interesting you have a higher percentage of people online but so how do you get them to appreciate the benefits of decentralization

um so we go into I'm doing a little chill here um this is what we build at quiddly we build like what we're trying to coin as micro on-ramps where we build token rails natively into web 2 apps um we're starting with slack and Discord it's kind of a fancy way of just saying P2P tipping um in in these web 2 apps but um for us like being able to meet the users halfway is a large kind of part of our vision of our mission and um while it may seem kind of trivial like the P2P tipping aspect I can show you like when when we started just primarily as a custodial like web app to do like dipping for distributed teams and stuff

like that um prior we had been building like smart contract like security tokens before real world assets were a thing and we spent like almost a year building smart contracts and stuff no one used our it's painful um when we had you know easy to send Bitcoin from shared custodial wallets people started tipping uh when we built that into slack and Discord within like the first year of doing that we were suddenly doing like a couple thousand in volume to a quarter million and last year alone when we finally like really ramped up Discord no mention of like decentralization no mention of like non-custodial wallets or something we did like three million in volume um these aren't like crazy D5 numbers of

course but I I think it goes a long way to like showing now like user experience is something that's sorely missing in group that kind of consideration is not there at all and you can have like you know Maxis railing on like uh where where like normal people not understanding but um I think that's just that's life like that is like the normal way internet products are built or products in general are built um things that I think are good Food For Thoughts is like Progressive decentralization sort of like shifting in ways that make sense some ideas that I thought like people should think about like we can all think about as we we

continue to build into space is yeah um less D more apps like like you don't have to build a full out on-chain solution from day one like what parts from from the problems you're trying to solve what parts do you need to go onto the blockchain what parts do need to be decentralized and what parts can can progressively be done so um I think seaweed is a great sign in with ethereum is a great kind of example of that kind of compromise like wallets as accounts is a big thing for identity um and I think more that just that should be explained explored more rather than just like through um uh to connect your wallet and stuff like that nfts as I mentioned as credentialism Beyond like pfts would be

great even defy Beyond like rug pulls is something we should um like these are the sort of things we should get more and more excited about now not where our next pump and dump is coming from um apps today I think that do a great example of this um coinbase I mean you can say any sex but I think coinbase is a great example of a crypto product that's progressively decentralizing Lolly as well for like earning Bitcoin Brave browser for people who are using it collecting bad finally forecaster one of my favorite decentralized social media protocols these guys they're not forcing anyone to do stuff on chain they're not forcing a

verification or anything but inherently large parts of the back end or large parts of the functionality and operations are on chain it's just the user has no need to kind of interact with any of that considerations um I do think more web 3 as a layer to web 2 similar to kind of what I mentioned the approach we're taking could be helpful I mean incentives are a big part of anything we do so like more ways around education for incentives rather than just like airdrop farming things like that I think are great considerations for people to make as you decide to build new things on crypto finally before I finish I think this is it's not blown up well enough but this

is like basically the history of web browsers over the past like two decades over here is like when um when uh sorry worldwide web browser was uh was made um here is a Navigator through Mosaic this is still really early and none of the stands have been built this is probably like the mid-2000s when more and more people were consumers were increasingly coming online it took almost 20 years to get to Chrome today which is like 66 of the market and this is how most people are accessing the internet today um it might seem like a painful slog that we have in crypto but this I mean

looking at this chart all the time like gives me so much perspective and it also shows you how like cross-chain protocols and things can evolve because it's the same thing with browsers like a lot of these protocols a lot of these development kits are mixed and um in terms of just grabbing that kind of perspective on how like crypto and web3 can grow I think this is one of my favorite charts to always share so thank you for listening I'm sorry 15 minutes it's really short but I hope there was some kind of uh interesting knowledge here shared and uh please connect with me in any way or I'm happy to take any questions after as well thanks [Applause] oh okay

everyone wants to party [Music] [Music]