I've been in the crypto space for almost four years now, and one thing still surprises me: how few people actually use crypto apps.

Think about AI / ML for a moment. Everyone, from my mom to friends who don’t even work in tech, is using AI tools daily—and they’re loving it. Meanwhile, in crypto, how many of us, even the builders, are making a single transaction per day on average?

A lot of this comes back to the "fat protocol thesis," which led to a kind of gold rush for building lower-layer tech stacks. The thinking was that someone else would eventually build the killer crypto app that would lead to mass adoption. But as we all know, everyone went for that same route, so hardly anyone built actual products that people want.

But some people are finally starting to realize that if we don’t focus on building apps that people want, mass adoption will never happen. We're just beginning to see the rise of consumer apps in crypto, but it's been a long time coming.

For the first three years, I was fully committed to the DAO and DeGov space. I thought DAOs would bring mass adoption, but I concluded that it won’t in the near future. Then I switched to onchain games. I've been experimenting with different things for the past seven months, and I've built up my thesis on how to build a consumer crypto app that people want.

Some of my points are pretty controversial, so if you don’t like them, feel free to skip ahead. But for those who are interested, let's dive in.

When I first started thinking seriously about consumer crypto apps, I got really excited about the concept of an Autonomous World—a game or digital world fully built on-chain, where the game logic and state live on the blockchain (everything except the frontend).

It was a compelling idea, partly because of what I had learned from building for DAOs. Governance is a major use case for blockchains, but let's be honest: most people don't care about the governance of DeFi protocols or Layer 2s. But what if it was the governance of a game world? That felt different.

Autonomous Worlds had this magnetic vision: if a game is fully on-chain, then anyone can build a frontend for it. It's a game that’s frontend-agnostic, persistent as long as its base chain exists, and has endless potential for composability.

I was particularly intrigued by the idea of plugin building. So, I teamed up with some friends, and we built four products around this concept. One of them was Skystrife x NightMarket, the first fully on-chain prediction market in production. I teamed up with Lib to create a kind of magic—an entirely on-chain prediction market where anyone could create markets without needing oracles or human inputs for resolutions.

It sounded pretty cool, right? Crypto-native to the core.

But then I learned something incredibly simple: people don’t care how decentralized, composable, or permissionless your project is.

What they care about is having a fun experience they can't get anywhere else.

By trying to build in a crypto-native way, you impose a set of HUGE constraints and trade-offs that doesn’t align with what consumers actually want. In our case, the biggest trade-off was that we couldn’t use off-chain data; limited to one fully onchain game world, SkyStrife players. While SkyStrife is super fun to play, you can’t allow this trade-off if you want to build products that consumers want.

We are trying to build a crypto app for people who never use or even dislike crypto. By going in the "crypto-native" approach, I realized that this was likely taking us in the exact opposite direction of where we needed to go. If you want to build a crypto app that people actually want, focusing on crypto-nativeness will lead you astray.

I'll explain more on this in my third point, but the takeaway here is to aim for what I call "Web 2.5" products—crypto-enabled products rather than crypto-native ones. In other words, crypto should be the "how," not the "why."

Here's my second point, which might be even more controversial: if you want to build a crypto app that people actually want, don’t start with degens. Start with non-crypto people from day 1.

Everyone building a crypto app seems to think the strategy is to acquire degens as initial users and then gradually expand to non-crypto people. But let’s be real: I don’t know of a single crypto app that has successfully done that.

Take Axie Infinity, for example. They spent a year iterating with non-crypto users (about 300 players) before they hit 2.8 million users. Polymarket did the same. Their initial users weren't degens, and they didn’t focus on acquiring them. If you look at Shane, the founder of Polymarket, he doesn’t have much presence in the crypto media, but you’ll find him alot on traditional gambling community podcasts.

Even Coinbase, which is too old for me to know their initial moves — I’m sure that if they had listened to degens in the early days, they wouldn’t be as big as they are today.

The reason why we haven’t seen many mass-adopted crypto apps is simple: people ask, "Why crypto?" and we tend to build in the crypto-native way as an answer because it’s cooler. Web 2.5 isn’t cool, and people criticize it for not being decentralized, composable, permissionless etc. I was also one of them for long.

If you start with crypto natives or degens, you’re going to have a hard time building something that non-crypto people want. Because their feedback is entirely different and you are optimizing it for the completely different needs.

Degens will ask alot about game mechanics and how its built, but their fundamental question is, “Can you rug me?”

Non-crypto people don’t care about that. They’ll just tell you wether “your game is fun or not”. Also wallets are hard to use, depositing is difficult etc.

Start with non-crypto build from day 1.

Crypto people ask “why crypto” all the time. IMO this is one of the foundmental reason why we haven’t built many successful crypto apps. The right question should be: How can we use crypto to create a new experience that people love?

Look at Axie Infinity. Most of their features are off-chain. The only thing that’s on-chain is the Axie NFT and being able to buy them with crypo.

Polymarket is similar. From a user’s perspective, besides the ability to bet with crypto, everything looks exactly the same as traditional prediction markets. They have nearly the same markets, and the UI looks similar.

If you try to optimize for the "Why Crypto?" question, you’ll end up far from what non-crypto people want. You prob "can" build Polymarket without crypto, but the product is way better with it. The same goes for Axie Infinity.

Look at Magic.link, USDC, Hamster Kombat, Blackbird and more ..

Stop asking why and start asking how.

Crypto enabled products > Crypto native products.

This is my current thesis on how to build a consumer crypto app that people actually want.

I might completely change my mind again while building and learning, but I hope it gives you some new insights.