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The Fallacy of Onboarding the Next Billion Users
- A debate at Devconflict, a side event of Devcon 2024 held by the Ethereum Foundation, discussed the best way to scale blockchain-based products and services to make them more accessible to the masses. The debate centered around two divergent opinions; building on-chain products to serve billions and building tailored on-chain products for specific niche audiences with customized needs.
- Building products for scale makes sense - building options for use on the internet has been a great way to reach global and universal audiences. However, the risk of oversimplifying the design of complex blockchain-based services is that it requires handing control back over to an organization or company rather than an individual user, which goes contrary to the ethos or principles of building a decentralized blockchain.
- The alternative is to build more precise solutions for a smaller group of users. Though building a successful product that is used and loved by several thousand or even millions of individuals can be incredibly useful, it is still not considered mainstream. Perhaps what is more important is whether the product is sustainable and valuable to both the team that created and maintains it and its end-users.
- One of the promises of building on-chain technology is that it allows the creation of more internet-native economies that don't require the same kind of approach to success similar to big box stores and mainstream media. This goal suggests creating specialized stacks of products that can be combined with related products to build suites of services that leverage things like network effects and global access, but do it in a way that is also extremely tailored and unique.
- To achieve internet scale while maintaining non-custodial control, the obvious answer is to build products that are better than anything that exists right now. For people concerned about privacy, this means building the best privacy product. For people with concerns about banks, it means building a streamlined non-custodial experience where key management becomes as easy as saving a username and password. For people worried about nationalism, it means building technologies that are global and multicultural at their foundation.
- Perhaps the key to scale is to think about how the product is composable, durable, and accessible. If the answer is yes, then it can become part of the fabric of the open internet. The product or service might even get remixed into something else or used by some other project. This goal requires building technologies that are global, networked, and non-hierarchical.
- In conclusion, it's not about the number of users one serves, but about building for certain specific audiences aligned with specific use cases while empowering users rather than just recreating technologies of the Web 2.0 stack.
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