In the last two blog posts, polynya dived into the topic of product-market fit in crypto. This article reminded me to share my thoughts on the signs of product market fit we can already see.
A major sign we can observe is users do not realize and do not care which blockchain they use. And that can be the end goal for the entire industry.
Now, the web3 world is more blockchain-centric rather than app-centric. This is because most users of dApps are involved with the blockchains as investors, degens, or builders. But this will change.
Yes, the blockchain choice can (and should) matter for developers, because each app has its own needs. In the web2 world, if a developer wants to build analytics software, they choose Clickhouse, but for e-commerce platforms, it’s probably better to use Postgres or some other relational database.
But end users do not care.
That’s common in web2, but fortunately, we can already see these signs in web3 as well. I’ll mention three examples of that here.
Tron USDT
Stablecoins have reached product market fit for several categories of users, like people from countries with unstable economies and those involved in international money transfers. For example, many merchants worldwide buy wholesale goods in China and send USDT to their suppliers.
I had conversations with several merchants who use Tron USDT. Here's what I see:
They don’t understand what blockchain is.
They don’t understand what Tron is.
And that’s great. Merchants are using Tron USDT for three reasons:
It’s easy to make international transfers.
It’s cheap.
Their suppliers also use it.
Nobody cares about decentralization, consensus algorithms or Justin Sun. They just want quick access to USD with cheap fees
Sorare
Sorare is an interesting project that is rarely talked about, built using Validium technology on Ethereum. One of the very few games that doesn't focus on web3 users but rather onboards real sports fans obsessed with card collecting.
The community that plays Sorare doesn’t realize they are using an L2 solution. They are focused on trading their cards and making money from that activity. And, occasionally, it just happened, perhaps not intentionally, but blockchain is the main technology that enables this.
Worldcoin
I'm not saying that it has reached product-market fit yet, but on their website, the Worldcoin team mentions that they have onboarded more than 2.5 million users worldwide. The company has a strong focus on the LatAm region and other countries with unstable economies, and probably the users don't care which L2 framework Worldcoin has chosen, or why optimistic rollups are better than ZK rollups (they're just cheaper).
Soon, we'll see more examples of this trend. Wikipedia (yep, that’s my source) says that the first dApps on Ethereum were built in 2016. I guess that 99% of the people who used them were aware that they were interacting with the Ethereum blockchain.
Let's see if by 2030, we have 99% of people not realizing which blockchain they are using.