1confirmation founder The next decade will be the golden age of consumeroriented cryptocurrency applications

1confirmation founder The next decade will be the golden age of consumeroriented cryptocurrency applications

1confirmation founder The next decade will be the golden age of consumeroriented cryptocurrency applications

Consumer Crypto
Author: Nick Tomaino, Founder of 1 confirmation

In the next decade, what I believe most firmly is that crypto applications will permeate various aspects of culture. In the past ten years, the focus has been on deep technology and finance. However, in the next ten years, we will see consumer crypto applications collide with different fields such as news, politics, sports, health/fitness, music, live streaming, podcasts, and more. These applications will become one of the most useful and valuable applications in history.

This may seem like a perspective contrary to mainstream investors, who continue to invest heavily in zero-sum products lacking innovation. While the community platforms discuss scalable L1s and yield-bearing stablecoins, developers are quietly working on products that can stimulate new consumer behavior, which will help us reach over a billion users as soon as possible and benefit the world.

In the past decade, I have learned a lot from many early consumer applications that successfully connected cryptocurrency with culture and attracted new users (such as Coinbase, Opensea, Polymarket, dYdX, etc.). If you are considering the next generation of top consumer cryptocurrency applications, here are four lessons that may be useful:

1. Mass adoption does not happen immediately, so focus on something you believe in, beyond money, and persevere for many years. Polymarket has been considered a failure multiple times, but founder Shayne Coplan and his team still believe in the belief that prediction markets can “bring more truth to the world.” They have encountered many obstacles along the way, which would have made most people give up, but their firm belief in something non-obvious and deeper than money has helped them survive. Polymarket’s trading volume exceeded $423 million in 2024 and now plays an important role in the 2024 US presidential election. Belief and persistence always pay off.

2. The intersection between purists and tourists is crucial. Coinbase has cleverly positioned itself at the intersection of purists and tourists over the past decade. If a product is too pure, it will remain niche and never break through. There may be a small group of people immersed in historical knowledge, appreciating subtle differences and loving it, but building for purists will limit your market size. If a product caters too much to tourists, people may temporarily like it but eventually leave. Quick come, quick go. In 2012, Brian Armstrong (Coinbase founder) made an early product design decision to “provide custodial wallet services to users,” believing that non-custodial wallets would not contribute to large-scale market growth. Thanks to this decision, Coinbase is now a publicly traded company worth over $50 billion.

3. Deeply understand the users and the culture of your market. When Opensea was launched in 2018, other NFT markets raised more funds and involved more prominent investors. Opensea emerged victorious because founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah didn’t care about false reputation or creating false narratives around their company; they simply focused on building a useful product. They talked to every NFT creator, participated in every NFT event, and understood the culture better than their competitors. Don’t worry about surface narratives, dig deeper, and you will outlast those who play perception games.

4. Block out existing tribal noise and create your own tribe. Truly useful applications don’t need to choose and please any existing tribe; they can create their own tribe. dYdX has shown the way in this regard. Founder Antonio Juliano and his team started in the Ethereum ecosystem, then launched the L2 supported by Starkex (Layer-2 scaling engine developed by StarkWare), and subsequently launched the dYdX chain supported by the Cosmos SDK. This may become more common in the future. Once you prove the utility of the application, you can fully go independent and launch your own chain instead of relinquishing a lot of control and value to existing chains.

Consumer crypto has been interesting in the past decade, but the next decade will be even more interesting, at least in my opinion. Thank you for reading.