Onchain is the new online

gm! It’s been a long while. 👋

Onchain summer is here. A new wave of consumer crypto apps is coming. 🕶️

What’s happening?

Prediction markets exploded into the scene

Polymarket lets you bet on the outcome of future events in a wide range of topics.

Last month, Polymarket, an onchain prediction market, saw a massive increase in activity with a volume of $472.87 million and over 50,000 active users.

Blockchains are now scalable

L2 fees are at an all-time low after the Dencun upgrade.

Network fees are at an all-time low thanks to the Ethereum Dencun upgrade, which significantly slashed the transaction fees of L2s. Now, you can also deploy new rollups in a few clicks with Conduit and Caldera.

Decentralized social is booming

Farcaster DAU is going up and to the right.

Web3 social apps are no longer a niche use case. Farcaster and Lens are breaking records in user activity.

Usability problems in web3 are solved

Embedded wallets simplify crypto UX by removing the need to open another app or external wallet.

Embedded wallets and social logins are ubiquitous, enabling seamless UX for new users. Builders can onboard users with Privy and Dynamic.

Stablecoins are everywhere, with TradFi joining in

Today, 56% of Fortune 500 companies are working on on-chain projects. Stablecoins now process more than twice as much transaction value as Visa every month. Bitcoin ETFs counts $63b in assets under management. BlackRock & Fidelity have launched tokenized Treasury products with nearly $1b in assets combined. Stripe now allows its merchants to accept payments in Ethereum, Solana, & Polygon without transaction fees. PayPal’s stablecoin has more than $0.5b in assets.

The Future of Blockchain Data, Tomasz Tunguz

Stablecoin APIs are laying more and more crypto rails. It will replace traditional payment networks in a few years - It’s already faster (days vs seconds) and cheaper (10s of dollars vs cents). This will bring billions of new users onchain.

What’s next?

We are at the cusp of a new crypto consumer wave in web3. However, building a successful consumer product is hard. It gets harder when you don’t know how your users use your product.

Crossing the chasm

In the 2010s Hubspot and Mixpanel transformed online marketing and product analytics respectively. Analytics tools like theirs made it easier for internet builders to understand and use data about online users. Alongside them came a wave of web2 consumer apps we still use today.

Analytics and data tools are fundamental for the success of consumer apps. Soon they will play a critical role in consumer crypto.

For the next while, I’ve decided to focus on solving challenges at the intersection of blockchain, data, and product analytics.

Are you building in consumer crypto? Say hi.