The real obstacles of “mass adoption”

Hi frens,

I’ve been observing how niche products turned into mainstream products and why.

Crypto folks like to talk about “mass adoption”, but they don’t always get into the practical details, or make the edge smoother.

For example, when running FAB DAO’s “Grant is Great!”, we would airdrop a little bit of cryptocurrency for newbies, to reduce the complexity of the donation process. In one case, the newbie couldn’t see the airdropped crypto (0.0015 ETH ≈ 3.4 USD), and ultimately I found that the wallet address was copied from a centralized exchange (CEX). That CEX didn’t support OP Mainnet and asked a 5,000 TWD (≈ 162 USD) fee to retrieve the assets!

Some other personal experience: I have a project “Voice of Legislative Yuan” and use a Blocto wallet for the OP Mainnet. Then after a quadratic voting, I received a funding of 1,845.4 USDC, on the Ethereum Mainnet.... but Blocto did not deploy the contract wallet to the same wallet address on all the Ethereum compatible blockchains! In other words, those fund could be locked forever.

I have tons of terrible experiences of handing crypto currencies or DApps. Messy implementations. Zero fault tolerance. Really bad error handling on many DApps.

I remembered web1 was a wild mess, too. Awful HTML cross-browser behaviors. The web started as a whole new world, but not reached “mass adoption” until the web2 products made themselves really accessible.

I’m already looking forward to web4 with “mass adoption”. But I’ve heard there’s web5 technology, and that’s quite 😶‍🌫️.

Your friend,

Denken