Sam Ragsdale@samrags_
With all due respect to Hasseeb, I completely disagree with this take.
Chris was and is a mentor to me, I'm not pretending otherwise.
But neither Chris nor Haseeb are builders in the category.
I have spent the last year in the trenches trying to build non-speculative consumer crypto usecases. Ignore "non-financial". That's a useless umbrella. I care about non-speculative.
Here's what I know with total clarity: Three years ago it was 100% impossible to ship a good consumer crypto experience.
Not hard. Not early. Impossible.
The wallet experience was complete and utter dogshit.
Injected wallets are an unacceptable UX.
Seed phrases, unacceptable.
Blind signing, unacceptable.
Bridging, unacceptable.
Here's your onboarding experience for a consumer media flow:
1. Install a fox-faced browser extension
2. Write down a 24 word seed phrase and hide it under your fridge (btw now some romanian dude's gonna break int your house)
3. Select a chain if god willing you understand what that means
4. Go find a bridge (Wormhole, LayerZero, ...) if you guessed wrong
5. Sign hexadecimal strings with very scary error messages
6. "Transaction pending... would you like to increase your gas price" (wtf is gas? they'll say)
Thats is before you even fund the thing.
But I'm not done, on ramps were even worse.
If you wanted to use some "web3 media" app, you had to open an exchange account. The UI looked like DraftKings for slop-maxxed decentralization jargon.
Spin the wheel to get decentralized compute coin on Arbitrum or turbo DNS coin on Polkadot! Last cycle nonsense.
Before you buy anything you need to go through a rigorous KYC process. SSN, address, Drivers License verification, transfer to your mobile device, liveness check on your face, transfer back, "a human in a remote country will check this asynchronously and we'll get back to you".
Now we sign into Plaid, put our bank credentials into some random form on this new DraftKing exchange, now they can auto-draw down money. Perfect.
Now god willing you've found UDSC and bought it on the right chain. You're ready to transfer out. You paste in your 40-character Hex address to the fox-head app.
That'll be 24-48 hours before it arrives due to ACH fraud risk.
Aaaand now you can use the web3 media app.
And KYB on ramps for enterprises? Rectal inspection. I need not go deeper.
Consumer apps are viral flywheels. If there's too much friction on the axle, the flywheel never spins. Crypto had superglue on the flywheel.
So when we say "the market rejected consumer crypto," we should ask a basic question.
Did we ever actually ship it in a form that normal people could evaluate.
Finance worked because the users were willing to tolerate absurd friction. Traders will jump through flaming hoops when their perceived EV is +infinite (because they're a genius and have alpha or astrology signals or whatever).
Media and other consumer activities do not get that tolerance budget.
Now enough with the pessimism of the past. Let's fast forward to today (or next 3 mo).
- Embedded wallets are real
- OAuth style onboarding is real
- Headless custody is real
- In app onramps are real
- Stablecoin onramps are real (this is a distinct thing and is critically important and I don't have time to explain in this post)
- KYB capable providers are emerging
Privy. Bridge. Stripe. Zerohash. Coinbases' new stack. This stuff is recent. Widely usable versions are maybe two years old. Broad developer adoption is even newer.
For the first time you can do something like:
- Sign in with email
- Wallet created under the hood
- Buy stablecoins inside the app
- Transact instantly
No exchange account, no raffle spinny wheels for decentralized slop, no fox icon, no seed phrase under your fridge.
That stack did not exist in a usable form when most of the "consumer experiments" were run.
After teh blood sweat and tears out of the L1 engineers, L2 engineers, the cryptographers, the wallet teams, the exchange teams, the compliance teams, and the onramp providers, we are finally getting something that resembles a sane consumer stack.
We are just getting the grease.
That does not mean consumer crypto is inevitable.
It does mean we are only now in a position to run the experiment honestly. It's the best time to build in crypto, in the history of crypto.
If it fails from here, with real UX and real onboarding and real distribution, then fine. I'll eat my shoe. Call it dead.
