Jerry Qian, founder of Toronto’s essential Bitcoin Bay meet-ups, joined me in the studio for the most recent episode of Is This The New Internet. His story in crypto starts off a lot earlier than many currently active here, having embraced Bitcoin before the “crypto sector” was even a thing. 2013 marked the first steps into crypto for both Jerry and myself. The stress and uncertainty of those days was totally different to today - we didn’t even know if Bitcoin would survive, let alone breach the $100,000 mark.
While it took me a few more years to be fully bought in, Jerry and his co-founders seized the moment, embracing Toronto’s position as an early epicentre of crypto development. They took it upon themselves to add to this city’s Web3 lore, marking the first steps of Bitcoin Bay.
We shied away from having a completely nostalgia-fuelled conversation about dino coins of yesteryear, despite a whole lot of temptation to do so. We did touch on the Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash tiff/civil war a few times in this episode, so that’s a bit of reminiscing you can look forward to. But this is the new internet, and we want to use the past to guide us about the best possible world we should be putting in place.
And that’s where the drive to speak to Jerry comes into play. In addition to the meetups, Jerry is a builder. His current project is the OPTN wallet, where he’s looking to empower adventurous Bitcoin enthusiasts with advanced functionality. We got into his motivations behind building the app, the process of putting something like this together, and how he sees OPTN and Bitcoin Bay fitting into the big picture of his life. Jerry touched on a several interesting points, a few of which I’d like to expand on here. So let’s get to it!
Here are 5 things I learned in conversation with Jerry Qian.
You don’t become the best-attended set of local meet-ups without some growing pains. Especially in the early days where we didn’t even know if crypto would be a long-term thing. Jerry was candid with me about the difficulties in hosting these at times. And when we consider the challenges that crypto has faced through the years, it checks out.
Ours is a market dictated by hype, emotions, and hunches formed through incomplete information. Mis- & disinformation is rampant. Whales and governments do as they please, forcing us to adapt. And the macro-economic situation will always have a say in how cycles unfurl.
All this unpredictability shows the complex web one needs to navigate to make it in Web3. And an often overlooked factor in determining success and failure is time. Timing, sure. But the dues in terms of hours spent that one needs to pay to this machine seem a constant hurdle for all looking to put ideas in motion. I’ve been through the hellish troughs of not knowing whether my business might even survive next month. I’m better for it, and especially with my dealing of uncertainty, and following my gut. I don’t think these learnings would be possible without going through the lows.
Jerry and his team’s survival today is testament to their ability to weather those tough times, without losing sight of what they set out to build.
"There were several days, several meetups, where at that time it was just me and (Bitcoin Bay co-founder) Antoine."
The ICO boom of 2018 was driven by the dreams of putting consumer-facing services on the blockchain. While I think it speaks to a more ‘honest’ time where people at least tried to appear to be solving a problem, this way of seeing the market had its pitfalls.
Just adding a blockchain doesn’t necessarily make a system better. Let’s look at supply chain management, where people claim to be able to incorporate blockchains to ensure nothing has been tampered with. Proof of integrity, they say. However, as long as there are workers and government officials who can be paid off, and systems to tamper, a blockchain doesn’t fix this. Sometimes there are difficult problems that take thoughtful analysis to fix, and there’s no getting around that.
Over the years we have worked through many ideas, and grown our knowledge of what blockchains can and cannot do. We’ve seen its weaknesses, and spawned entirely new chains in order to address them. But there’s so much left to learn, test, and iterate. This space is in constant-beta and experimenting in real-time. Learning how best to implement these trustless and permissionless rails, in the most seamless way (from the perspective of the user) is the challenge faced by builders today.
"We have some inherent systemic issues and problems in the current way of doing things. And it's not necessarily to say that blockchain or crypto would be like replacing them altogether, but it's more so as a tool to augment all these features."
Carrying on from crypto not being a magic solution, we’re got to assess another misconception that burdens our ability to explain what a crypto future would look like. There seems to be a bit of a ‘winner takes all’ mentality with the way ideas are funded, supported and discussed. It’s less prevalent with VCs, but communities of competing ideas seem to be at loggerheads trying to discredit each other. If we’re reshaping the world as we know it with Web3, there’s not just plenty of room for competition, it’s desirable to ensure each team continues to push boundaries.
The depth of offerings in this space mean that there would likely be a chain better suited for a set of functions that others. And that’s ok, we need to lean into what makes the infra we’re building distinct. While there are often different companies working in the same sector, the market will ultimately decide which of the rails being established are best-suited for the task. Attaining this balance that turns into a ‘secret sauce’ won’t necessarily even be about which chain is fastest, most resilient, or whichever aspect you might think is most important. The manner in which the market selects winners and losers is still, most definitely, unclear. The sector simply hasn’t been around long enough just yet to claim a track record of success.
"I do believe that there is a healthy mosaic or arrangement of where certain tech is applicable and best suited for different kinds of uses. Why would you need to be forced onto just one chain all by itself?"
People who are in crypto love it, and often live their lives plugged into the space entirely. The daily life of a crypto enthusiast bears such little resemblance to a person working a traditional 9-5 that we have completely different sales funnels. For those not in marketing, the way we get our products in front of you involves researching how a typical user goes about their daily lives. With this info we can infer when a person might be most receptive to branded messaging.
Being in crypto grants you access to an in-group. We have a different language, effectively - and the way we communicate signals whether you’re a part of this group, or not. This space also feels like it’s growing outward, all the time. New chains, tokens, innovations, earning mechanisms, airdrops. It’s constant, it’s fragmented, and navigating these spaces requires a lot of knowledge that can only really be acquired through involvement. There’s no book you can read to get caught up, because the culture is always changing.
This would be fine if there were hundreds of millions of us like this. But the reality is that crypto doesn’t nearly have enough users, and it’s a bat frequently used to beat our industry with. As a marketer, my job is to bridge this gap to bring in new users. But it’s monstrously difficult. Has anyone using Duolingo ever convinced you that they’re fluent in the language they’re learning? That’s sort of the challengers us marketers face. Crypto marketers are appealing to the same small cohort of users, and we end up wondering why the all-important ‘daily active user’ metric sputters a mere few weeks after launch. So, when Jerry spoke about the current suite of apps limiting the more informed users in our space, it got me thinking.
We are all marketing to the same people. Look at the apps of today - this market is serving those looking for breadth. Trade millions of cryptocurrencies. Ok fine. But there’s so much beyond trading, right? What if we make something with a level of depth that can satiate the appetite of power users? Jerry looks to be tapping to a niche that’s occupied by some of the heaviest hitters in the space. Funds being wielded by these individuals are comparable to small nation states.
Is there value to serving those looking for infinite depth to this market? I’m here to see it.
"Most of the wallets are really geared towards transferring tokens. And exchanges onboarding with fiat. But when you look at what the keys are actually capable of, it’s (the current options are) very, very limiting.
Even for something like multi-signature authentication for your transactions, very few wallets actually do support that."
I don’t hear non-crypto folks who only casually speak about our industry mention anything about crypto that isn’t price-related. Now that we haven’t got the fabled ‘banana market’ of exponential price gains (so far?), many think our current run is over. One look on Twitter can show that people are tired of recycling the same tropes, and were hoping to be using a different tone at this point.
The lack of a wider series product-market fits, after so many years, is telling. My previous guest Chinmay Patel mentioned that we haven’t really taken the momentum of meme coins and turned it into something more lasting. Few things attract people quicker than the promise of riches for very little work. I think we fix this by appealing to a sense of higher purpose.
Now, more than ever before, it feels like people are in crypto purely because of the money. To draw from point 2, what we are building today feels ephemeral. Here one moment, gone the next, leaving very few traces of any meaningful impact. Rinse and repeat. I yearn for the days of “Uber, but on a blockchain.” It felt we were building something to last, and the end user was a real person. That, for me, was just the start though, to prove that this tech could fix things. The results? Debatable. But are there some winning ideas out there? Probably. But I fear that a person working on these “real” problems is laser-focused on their technical journey, rather than playing the attention game that’s needed for market traction.
"We also see a lot of people behind the scenes actually building out projects that... they just can't market it as wide as some of these meme coins can."
Wandering through crypto’s memory lane with Jerry was fantastic, and it was a timely moment to think about how far we’ve come as industry. And from my time so far speaking with builders in Toronto, I think there’s plenty more left to come. The space is getting broad enough for people to niche down into sub-sector, and that bodes well for our ability to hunker down and build. It’s impossible to know if Web3 will live up to any of its lofty ambitions, but I can see that people are trying.
This was just a few of my thoughts from my chat with Jerry. You can listen to the whole episode on Pods by clicking on the thumbnail below. The episode is collectible, right in your wallet. If you use Rainbow, your collection looks pretty slick. All of Jerry's links are below too, and if you're in Toronto you have to attend the next Bitcoin Bay meetup. If you're a crypto enthusiast in this city, it's almost a rite of passage.
Collect this episode to support Is This The New Internet? and secure your spot on the leaderboard!
I had one of Jerry’s co-founders at Bitcoin Bay with me on an earlier episode too, the fabled Lisan Al-Gaib. Attaching his episode as well, enjoy the Bitcoin Bay deep dive.
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