Why crypto remains niche and far from mainstream

Cryptocurrency continues to capture the imagination of proponents and make headlines on an almost daily basis. But in many ways it is still an immature industry with relatively few use cases. The main battle right now is adoption, especially during a bear market – in terms of raising general awareness and encouraging more people to actually use both cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology in their everyday lives.

For the past five years or so, buzzwords have all too often defined the industry. In 2017, initial coin offerings (ICOs) were at their peak. Today, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are essentially the ICOs of five years ago. Next year will likely see a new crypto buzzword.

Due to the industry’s obsession with flashiness over substance, not enough companies in the crypto space are focused on building a quality product from a user interface and user experience perspective, delivering real value and providing a great customer experience. It shouldn’t be about just making a new and trendy thing but offers an actual application and value that people seek in everyday life.

The meaning of value

Value is about providing something consumers need, offering a solution to a problem they have or letting them do something they find attractive. Instagram took off as people recognized both its ease of use and how much they valued keeping their circle informed of their activities. One of Twitter’s biggest value propositions is allowing anyone to connect and interact with authority figures and celebrities, which helped fuel its meteoric rise.

In fintech, value usually means you build something that provides a service or feature that hasn’t existed before or offers at least a 10X improvement over what’s currently available. It will be much faster, better or easier compared to existing offers.

Robinhood is a good example of just that. In the past, people had to rely on financial advisors and use various banking services to buy shares and other financial assets. The system was outdated, limited and far too technical to navigate for the average person. Robinhood emerged and made it extremely accessible, providing significant value through an innovative and targeted business model.

Growing pains

With cryptocurrency, the underlying concept is amazing. You can transfer value and monitor it worldwide on a transparent, distributed ledger that no one owns or controls.

When ICOs came into existence about five years ago, many of them offered components of great value on the surface. Apart from regulations, compliance and jurisdictions, it became much faster and more efficient for companies to raise capital. They can essentially start the ecosystem and have a good base of potential users – the early adopters.

The downside? Many scams developed because of the lower barrier to entry, and bad actors used buzzwords with little actual value to create a sense that the “next big thing” was here. It turns out that many people who are very good at marketing aren’t very good at building good products, or don’t even want to build them in the first place. So most ICOs, as with most IPOs in the late 1990s, turned out to be either scams, failed, or mismanaged.

For non-fungible tokens, the same pattern has emerged. Artists now have an efficient way to digitally “watermark” their works to combat plagiarism and provide proof of ownership, while earning commissions on secondary market sales. So there are very specific use cases for NFTs with clear benefits. But still, the majority of them are just speculation or ridiculous nonsense – which the falling NFT market now reflects.

Projecting a way forward

The future of crypto will not be about latching onto the next buzzword as we have seen in the past, from ICOs to Decentralized Finance (DeFi) to Web 3.0 to NFTs.

While the idea of ​​being your own bank is a great innovation, it’s not yet user-friendly enough to gain widespread use, so its value has been limited to the tech-savvy. Unfortunately, some cryptocurrency companies are now well-known and trendy because they buy naming rights to stadiums or have celebrity endorsers, instead of focusing on their product and service. Behind all this, they are often just white-label platforms that offer no innovation or value and usually provide a poor or overly complicated user experience.

A great product is one that is user-friendly and a source of real everyday value for users. It’s also better, faster and easier than any existing offering, as well as backed by knowledgeable and fast technical support.

Above all, adoption poses the main challenge for the future of cryptocurrency. The reality is that the better the user experience, the more centralized the platform. So the question becomes: Is there a middle ground where you can improve the experience while retaining the idea of ​​decentralization?

Whoever creates a mainstream product that introduces the average person to crypto in a user-friendly, intuitive way will solve the adoption problem and take the entire industry to another level.