I started my crypto journey as a contributor to open source, proof-of-stake blockchains. I joined Kraken to accelerate awareness of these projects. While at Kraken, we kept a pulse on major Web3 ecosystems. NEAR Protocol stood out in a truly unique way. In less than two years their third-generation Blockchain has delivered massive value to a community of users and creators who drive the majority of progress. There are thousands of developers building software enabled by NEAR, millions of users in the ecosystem, and billions of dollars in token value. Everyone involved is committed to a world where creativity is no longer held back by technology.
To achieve this vision NEAR is enabling entirely new paradigms in user experience, more efficient business models, and merging corporate with community governance. I am excited to share that I will be joining NEAR’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin to steer Product in the NEAR Ecosystem. It is a unique role in which I seek to inspire a community to build applications that are more engaging, transparent, and sustainable than ever before. What better way to kick off this new chapter than to share the three observations that have inspired me to take the leap into this global experiment?
User experience is missing expectations for most Web3 applications.
There are 300 million people who own crypto worldwide. But this is a tiny fraction of the ~5 billion people on the internet. Why? Crypto services traditionally have been incredibly hard to onboard and use. Services often require complex wallets or special hardware. No longer the case with apps powered by NEAR. Seamless consumer experiences begin with familiar, standard email onboarding. Take Sweat, for example: an incentivized lifestyle app where you can “spend” your steps. Sweat has 100 million+ users and has overtaken Web2 health apps like All Trails with 40 million+ users in app stores. It is solving one of the hardest problems in healthcare: Motivating preventive medicine in a decentralized way.
I think we all fear the idea of an insurance company or government penalizing individuals for not walking a certain number of steps with a forced mandate. If this isn’t in a Black Mirror Episode, it should be.
My own experience with Sweat was motivated by the fact I stopped posting my runs on Strava and Instagram. I don’t think anyone cares that much about my exercise. I have hundreds of followers and maybe a few will give me a “fire” emoji reaction on a run. If I post 4 days in a row I get no encouragement. It’s boring to see me run the same route, even though this is best for tracking my health progress. But with Sweat there’s a new source of motivation. It feels great to donate the sweatcoins I earn from my runs to nonprofits promoting reforestation or performing cataract surgeries in Africa. I love seeing the community’s reactions to hitting our donation goals as well. It keeps me motivated to know that taking care of myself can also take care of others. It’s a beautiful alignment of personal incentives to community good that ultimately makes me more likely to live an active and happy life. I look forward to making my weekly donations of 50 coins by hitting my step goal 5 out of 7 days a week. For those that don’t feel charitably inclined, companies often sponsor gift cards you can redeem your Sweatcoins for to keep you moving and healthy. Sweat is a delightful experience.
More efficient business models are needed for all software.
Maybe you fancy yourself a business pragmatist and believe that “novel” consumer experiences rarely turn into sustainable businesses. Eventually people get bored and companies have to spend massive amounts of money on paid advertising to sustain user growth. Apps like Vine and Clubhouse certainly seem to offer evidence to this point. Sweat, however, does something different from a growth perspective that is only achievable with a simple, scalable, and sustainable blockchain like NEAR. They’ve created a community-owned market out of value that has not been efficiently captured in the past. They leverage this new value to create authentic brand engagements for lower cost.
Sweat creates a market for steps, owned by those who hold Sweat tokens. By ascribing a token value to steps and a conversion rate of tokens needed for a gift card, they are creating a market. These market valued tokens are redeemable for gift cards of potential value. A user has to convert to a purchase in order for the cost to the business to materialize. Receiving a gift card for hard work and achievement increases your positive sentiment with a service. Everyone likes to be rewarded for achieving. On NEAR there’s a simple JavaScript library available to app developers to easily integrate token creation seamlessly into their apps. The cost is also minimal given the scalable sharding design of NEAR. It’ll likely cost you cents to mint.
Back in 2018, Growth expert Andrew Chen asked on Twitter, “what percentage of startup funding is actually left behind after you pay Google and Facebook for ads?” The answer is a lot less than you think. It doesn’t matter if you are in Web2 or Web3. Capital has tightened for everyone and NEAR offers a way for creators to build more efficient economies of growth.
Users are the lifeblood of software and they deserve a real voice.
There’s a constant tension between shareholders and user communities when it comes to the standard corporate model. Your best users are rarely your largest investors. Very good investors know the importance of customer satisfaction and product excellence for sustaining a business. But the incentives don’t always align. A feature the community wants can jeopardize monetization in Web2 models.
User feedback is often collected through voting and ideas forums. The voices are rarely executed on. Remember “dislike” on Facebook? Likes were first introduced in 2009 and one of the most popular features requested after that was “dislike.” Users wanted to dislike something so they wouldn’t see the content again. It took until 2016. Seven years for a form of discontent with emoji reactions. The original reason for not implementing dislike was that Zuckerberg didn’t think negative expressions were “good for the world.” The underlying reason was to maintain an audience for advertisements. “Disliked” content comes with the product expectation of not seeing it again, which translates to less content consumed and less time spent on Facebook.
This is where we are experimenting with something new here at NEAR. NDC, or the Near Digital Collective, is a governance experiment that will allow anyone who stakes $NEAR tokens to participate in the future of funding and development on the core protocol and the ecosystem. It is an experiment to ensure that everyone who has a relationship with NEAR can influence real action. NDC just started but I’m excited to participate in formation and operations.
In addition to this perspective on Web3, I am extremely inspired by the vision and impact NEAR has on society. NEAR is the only carbon neutral blockchain at scale. This matters a lot as we usher in billions more people to the next-generation internet and we think about a sustainable path to the future. Hopefully this post answers the question of why I joined an experimental blockchain group! If you’d like to discuss any of these topics, or are curious about our ecosystem and grants program, drop me a note!