Between growth in L2 adoption and account abstraction, the era of onboarding millions of new users onchain is finally upon us. This is largely occurring under the umbrella of consumer crypto, which typically refers to aspects of crypto that are more focused on our regular consumer activities (eg. media, social media, retail etc). However, much of this narrative concentrates on advanced markets, leaving emerging markets underserved. Many consumer crypto products are either not accessible or just not useful to potential users in the Global South. These are just some of the many reasons for the birth of Oasis Onchain - to surface and bring accessible and impactful consumer crypto products to those who genuinely need them.
In this consumer crypto report, we want to highlight products and startups across payments, onchain media, decentralized social media, and gaming that meet our consumer trifecta:
Easy to use
Fun
Impactful (Especially to those in the global South)
Essentially, the products that hit all three will be the true game-changers.
Payments:
Writing about issues with payments in crypto is always interesting, given how much of crypto is actually just…payments. Crypto is one of the best avenues globally for peer-to-peer payments and transactions. The difficulty, however, has been integrating these peer-to-peer transactions into more traditional payment interactions, such as bank accounts and point-of-sale systems.
In the US, on and off-ramp options are plentiful, and household names like Venmo, Stripe, and Robinhood support varying levels of crypto interactions. There has also been a recent surge in crypto-native products providing on/off-ramp services in the US and/or Europe, and these are definitely important moves toward increasing accessibility and adoption in the space.
Unfortunately, most of these options are inaccessible to many in the Global South because of evergreen issues. Typical ones include: unfavorable banking relationships, specific heavy-handed financial regulatory regimes, and the huge barrier for people wanting to move from fiat into crypto or back into fiat.
At Oasis Onchain, we highlighted that these particular difficulties block many from participating in the onchain economy, especially in the Caribbean. The Bahamas, for example, is located just 50 miles away from the US, but suffers from all the aforementioned barriers. Imagine your next-door neighbor not having access to the same road that you drive on every day. What we need are more payment-oriented products built in and for the Global South.
There are, thankfully, a few payment-oriented products focusing on payment options in the Global South, and they understand the need to provide more access to these emerging markets. These products include Sphere, Onboard Wallet, Beam Wallet (by Eco), and Decaf. These products are moving forward to improve access, whether by providing on/off-ramps or connecting their product to already existing local on/off-ramps. They also fulfill the consumer trifecta of being impactful while also being easy to use and fun to experience. Their wallet creation processes are easy to use, the transaction fees are minimal, and they create new payment opportunities for merchants and vendors to start their businesses locally and distribute internationally.
ONCHAIN MEDIA
Onchain media promises to redefine our interaction with digital content, brands, and their communities. It facilitates an unprecedented level of decentralization and transparency in publishing, storing, and managing media content. At its core, onchain media refers to the practice of media content living on the blockchain usually recognized as an NFT (nonfungible token). This method stands in contrast to traditional media and web2 distribution, shifting away from centralized orgs an into redistributed ownership. The implications offer a new paradigm for content creation, ownership, and monetization. Onchain media encompasses a myriad of products like NFTs, images, videos, music, podcasts, and even the very brand and content narratives that define modern digital culture.
In 2021 we saw a massive growth in "wallets" created, the NFTs market hit an all time high, trading volumes surged by more than 700% in the third quarter. The trend continued into 2022, with OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplaces at the time, seeing 1.85 million transactions, 300,000 unique wallet addresses interacting with smart contracts, and 350,000 ETH in trading volume by September 2022. While this was a monumental milestone for blockchain, much of the onchain interactions still have a long way to go before they catch up to 90% of the global market. The consumer markets need to understand crypto/blockchain beyond its currency.
The transition towards onchain media highlights a shift from lifestyle-driven economies to the new, where culture and commerce intersect more authentically. It enables brands to forge deeper connections with their customer, moving beyond the one-sided engagements of traditional markets. At the forefront, brands such as NBA, Starbucks, Nike, and Adidas experimented with the first iterations of how it could work. This evolution facilitated the creation of a meaningful brand community centered around shared values and interests, thereby enhancing the significance of memetic effects in shaping cultural discourse.
Fast forward to 2023, we see a rise of consumer-friendly products that go beyond connecting your Metamask, or Zerion wallet to access. A prime example of this is KIKI World, a curated beauty company that completely abstracts blockchain tech. Involving their users in product releases through votes on latest colors for new collections. Curation in this form of onchain membership and loyalty points. It all transcends content selection; it fosters an ecosystem where creators and consumers exist in mutual symbiosis. Platforms and tools that support onchain media enable users to tailor their experiences, engage in governance, and directly influence the trajectory of products, content and communities.
The monetization model of onchain media distinctly departs from traditional approaches, focusing primarily on the creator. A prime example is the Rehash podcast by Diana Chen, who built a completely decentralized model in how she not only monetizes her content, but allows her audience to participate in the process of curation around participants who become guests on the show. By eliminating intermediaries, creators capture a more significant portion of the revenue derived from their work, with smart contracts facilitating NFT voting, and purchases of said NFT passes automate payments and royalties. This model reflects a profound change in how brands interact with their audiences, prioritizing direct engagement and content creation to build relationships.
The core product of modern brands is increasingly becoming media itself. We see this with as more creators make their way to Zora, or in the recent participation of I <3 the Art, a movement to drive culture and unique artwork into the realm of crypto. Onchain media allows creators to leverage these relationships, transforming consumers into active participants in their narrative and success.
Onchain media represents a significant shift in the digital content paradigm, driven by decentralization, transparency, and direct engagement. It offers a promising avenue for creators to monetize their work fairly and for consumers to engage with content on a more meaningful level. As we move towards a future where onchain media becomes mainstream, the potential for reshaping cultural commerce and fostering genuine communities around brands and creators is immense.
DECENTRALIZED SOCIAL MEDIA
Millennials and Gen Zs are totally hooked on the online scene, where our face-to-face chats often mimic the ones we have online. While some might think of Myspace as the OG social network, digital communication goes way back to the telegraph, when transatlantic messages shared urgent signals via Morse code in 1844. During the 60s and 70s, the earliest forms of the intranet such as the ARPANET and NSFNET connected scientists + researchers. In ‘97, Six Degrees was the first social network site on the World Wide Web. Throughout the mid-2000s and 2010s, social media has become one of the primary sources of information + attention. Today, over 5 billion people participate in the “attention economy” across a suite of products such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
Although many are using social media to influence their audiences, distribution, and discoverability are some of the biggest unlocks for social. Within the context of the Global South, social media offers a more inclusive and democratic form of digital interaction, where users from the Global South can have equal participation and representation compared to their Western counterparts. Thanks to digital distribution, small businesses from the global South now have access to previously inaccessible markets.
Decentralized social media is a revolutionary counterpart to traditional Web2 platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In Web3, the power dynamics shift from corporate control to user empowerment. These platforms operate on peer-to-peer technologies, where no single entity owns or controls the network. This means that users have more control over their data and can decide how the platform operates. For instance, platforms such as Steemit allow users to earn cryptocurrency to create and curate content.
In 2023, friend.tech kicked off the consumer crypto craze with financial speculation embedded with social engagement and follows. Many criticized whether this was the true purpose of decentralized social media. But in 2024, we saw decentralized social rise to the par of web2 social platforms, especially in terms of distribution. Farcaster solved a particular web3 pain point by enabling Frames so that web3 builders, creators, and developers could distribute their products through an easily embedded interactive link. We witnessed an energetic shift towards consumer crypto and a new era of Farcaster-native startups. Teams like interested.fyi, Hypersub and drakula.app have bootstrapped their businesses solely on Farcaster. There’s also an increase of onchain interactions on Lens via their Open Actions.
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At Oasis Onchain, we emphasized how decentralized social technologies can integrate emerging market users as active contributors and beneficiaries. At Oasis, we explored the decentralized social stack from Top of the Funnel solutions like Chipped, which promotes wearable NFC chips that carry your identifiers to Base, one of the leading L2s with over 145M transactions and over 1B USD TVL. We also explored solutions that aimed to unify the social experience, such as yup.io, and hosted a pilot activation with Beam wallet, where attendees got onboarded with new wallets and paid for a drink in crypto in less than 60 seconds.
What is essential to the success of decentralized social is culture. It captures the value of IRL social relationships in a digital onchain dimension. It motivates people of similar ethos to double down and further increase the meme within their social circles.
Onchain culture also paves the way for significant cross-pollination and immutable legacy. What we witnessed at Oasis Onchain was not just conversations centered in the context of the Global South but an organic cross-pollination of ideas, values, and solutions between the local population and builders from the West. Frothy exemplified this in their UX workshop where they challenged attendees to integrate their learnings and develop eight localized web3 solutions in 8 minutes.
Post-Oasis, we see the immutable value of onchain culture come through via decentralization. @747crash has not only created a meme token that satirically pulls from the failings of Boeing, but it has created avenues and incentives that empower community members + creators to proliferate the culture within the brand guidelines. The result? A flourishing community that is proactive about growing a brand through social and has extensive rights to decide the brand’s future.
Whether it's onchain, offchain or hybrid, decentralized social media is positioned to have an explosive period of growth. Users are more aware of their data rights and more vocal about the equity structure within social media algorithms. If decentralized platforms can achieve the same level of stickiness, account threshold and discoverability as their web2 counterparts, the culture around social media is poised to change forever.
Oasis Onchain 2024 was the first of its kind in the region and the first summit focused exclusively on consumer crypto. It highlighted the necessity of a shift toward addressing the need for viable consumer crypto projects in the Global South.
https://zora.co/collect/base:0x6a080d831cdee15263cc6db32e0f888d9ec11392/1But organizing Oasis was far from easy. Specifically, we ran into issues processing cross-border payments and struggled to use existing consumer crypto solutions outside of the US. This was definitely a meta moment and served as a stark reminder of the challenges faced by individuals and businesses all over the Global South. It also reinforced our belief that Oasis absolutely needed to happen, and strengthened our commitment to overcoming these obstacles and driving meaningful change in the consumer crypto landscape.
At Oasis Onchain 2024, we planted the seeds for an energetic and inclusive community dedicated to finding easy-to-use, fun, and impactful solutions. And we are already seeing the fruits of our labor sprouting. In the past month, Farcaster has seen a significant increase in consumer crypto builders. Dedicated consumer L2s are emerging like Morph, and even ZK teams are bridging the gap between applied cryptography and consumer applications.
https://zora.co/collect/base:0x6a080d831cdee15263cc6db32e0f888d9ec11392/2In 2025, we have BIG plans. We are doubling down on our mission to make consumer crypto accessible and useful to everyday people in the Caribbean and beyond. Next year, as we continue on this trajectory, Oasis Onchain plans to not only facilitate essential conversations about consumer crypto, but also to create pathways and programs for builders, teams, and protocols to grow and scale Global South-native consumer solutions. We extend a warm invitation to all projects driving innovation in consumer crypto to join us at the Oasis.
https://zora.co/collect/base:0x6a080d831cdee15263cc6db32e0f888d9ec11392/3Over 100 subscribers
Stefen Deleveaux, marvelgirl.eth, Amira Gariba, and 2 others
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Big shout out to @stefdelev and the oasis onchain crew for featuring @bend.eth (built on @eco) in their Consumer Crypto in the Global South 2024 write-up!! https://paragraph.xyz/@oasisonchain/global-south-onchain