In the past few months, I have had conversations with dozens of entrepreneurial teams. I have found that some teams do not think about users from first principles, do not have a clear understanding of user needs, make assumptions about what users want, or make too many assumptions about users.
Technological innovation is fascinating. But the ultimate audience for all of this is the users. As Steve Jobs said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.” Entrepreneurs need to think more about putting users at the center and adopt a “work backwards” mindset.
Folks, it’s time to seriously focus on the users again.
1. UI/UX
UI/UX design, such as that of Uniswap and Lido, has become the benchmark for Crypto. The design should be as simple and intuitive as possible, allowing users to easily understand and use the platform, minimizing friction, and making minimal assumptions about users.
1.1 UI
The website is usually the main entry point for users to interact with a project. As a heavy product user, I have had two memorable moments of frustration:
When I opened a website and saw three or four entry buttons. When I intuitively clicked on these buttons, they took me to different pages, each with a lot of information and complex design elements. I suddenly felt anxious, not knowing where to start.
The project did not provide any documentation. Documentation is a portal for many users to quickly understand project information, and it is a faster and more efficient way to understand a project than whitepapers and blogs. Some “buzzwords” on the homepage do not help users fully understand a project beyond promotional slogans.
1.2 UX
I would like to use two examples to illustrate the need for higher granularity in the current Crypto user experience.
Mobile
I have always believed that the importance of mobile has been overlooked. Currently, most dapps lack a seamless mobile experience and can only be used through a browser (built-in wallet) and require switching between the browser and wallet for operations. Imagine being a passionate memecoin trader, feeling anxious about your position when you can’t guarantee that you’re always in front of your computer. Having a mobile Dexscreener would bring you peace of mind.
Through collaboration with Privy, friend.tech has taken a step towards an integrated wallet. However, compared to mobile interfaces of centralized exchanges, DEXs still have a long way to go in terms of user experience. Real-time notification push or price alerts would be useful for time-sensitive transactions (e.g., contract transactions). The importance of being able to share anytime, anywhere in social applications goes without saying.
AI Agent
AI and LLM can help users understand a new project.
For example, when I visit a Layer2 Ecosystem page, I often feel confused. It showcases common protocols like Uniswap and Aave, a bunch of wallets, tools, and more. I know these protocols, but I don’t know where to start. Imagine an agent that can tell you what dapps everyone is playing on this Layer2 based on recent on-chain data, or what the fastest-growing protocol is. It can even provide targeted advice based on the behavior of each user’s address.
These are just a few examples that make me feel that there is still much room for improvement in Crypto UX. A few years ago, I would have believed that we didn’t have infrastructure that was good enough to support mass adoption applications. Recently, we have had scalable underlying chains and user onboarding processes that are easy to integrate. Now is the time to focus more on UX.
2. Stickiness… What to do?
In Crypto, it is relatively easy to obtain short-term growth data – you can immediately launch a campaign and give away a Genesis NFT to achieve short-term goals. This has become a kind of hint, as users have certain expectations of potential benefits in the future. However, attracting real users and obtaining their long-term adoption is a more difficult task with almost no shortcuts (Uniswap took almost three years to build a good product before DeFi Summer).
It is worth noting that Warpcast currently accounts for 90% of network activity, but there can be other clients on this infrastructure offering unique proposals. Additionally, most people use it as a purely Web2 social media platform because users have not been trained to utilize everything it offers. An important growth signal would be personal use of the Farcaster native solution, making its user experience different from what is expected (decentralized social graph, frameworks, etc.), which may take time as the graph itself is not mature or powerful enough in its early stages.
2.1 Acquisition, wait… is it all about airdrops?
Although I don’t want to confuse airdrops with customer acquisition, airdrops have become a shortcut for acquiring users.
Generally speaking, airdrops are now seen as a means of customer acquisition, and the tokens distributed in airdrops are seen as customer acquisition costs.
I think it is important to think about the purpose of airdrops. What do you want to achieve through airdrops, and how do you manage expectations and develop strategies based on these goals?
StarkNet recently rewarded the top 5,000 contributors to GitHub’s global repositories in their airdrop. It is clear that this was done to bring StarkNet and even Crypto into the view of traditional developers. Other protocols have proposed airdropping tokens to home stakers or teams building public goods.
I agree with what Regan said: “Community means making money with your internet friends.” We have to admit that many users use a pre-tokenized protocol to get airdrops.
However, I am skeptical of what Hayden said: “Don’t be stingy – give a significant amount away. If you don’t think the community deserves a significant amount, don’t release a token.” The “Community” mentioned by Hayden in this statement is not the same as the real “Community” in reality.
It should be noted that during the airdrop season, it is very difficult to distinguish between the real “Community” and the “witches” that have become an industry. To address this issue, protocols need to spend more time identifying true contributors and considering long-term development.
Airdrops have become somewhat toxic. Users often see venture capital firms and project teams as their absolute adversaries. Project teams are caught in a dilemma when designing airdrop rules, as a significant portion of the community consists of airdrop farmers who may fud your project on CT if they feel they have not been rewarded well. However, if there is no witch filtering, tokens are often not rewarded to real users and can create significant selling pressure. This is quite tricky for project teams.
That being said, when using airdrops to bootstrap, always be clear, do not deceive users, and ensure clear communication of information and rules.
In my opinion, if you are a long-term builder, try to bring things back to the organic way. Don’t do excessive marketing to give users unnecessary expectations, focus on building a good product.
In summary, most projects use airdrops to attract and retain long-term users. This requires having a good enough product before releasing airdrop expectations. If the user experience is poor, airdrops can even have a negative impact and leave a bad impression on users.
If you don’t have clear airdrop goals and strategies, as well as a good product, focus on building, enjoy organic growth, and wait for better timing.
2.2 Retention
Different types of projects often have different user retention strategies: for DeFi, it’s about liquidity; for NFTs, it’s more about the community.
Uniswap has built up robust liquidity and a strong brand over the past few years. When people want to swap a token, they often instinctively think of Uniswap as the platform with the best liquidity and lowest slippage, without needing to check DeFiLlama for the best pool depth. The brand effect built on people’s intuition creates a strong moat.
Additionally, liquidity built by large funds is relatively stable. Actions by large funds are often slower than those of small funds, making it extremely difficult to rebuild liquidity unless you can provide strong incentives.
For application-focused projects directly targeting end users, community may be the most important thing. Of course, the concept of community is difficult to concretize. You can say that the essence of a community is a certain culture, symbols, and a group of unique individuals coming together for something fun.
When evaluating whether founders are Crypto-native, we often communicate with them about their understanding of the community. This understanding comes from long-term accumulation in the community for at least a year or two, and is based on intuition and mindset. For these types of projects, founders need to try to understand the community, feel the culture, and listen to what users are saying.
3. Seeking Token-market-fit
Tokens to some extent reflect the market’s consensus on a project. Taking the examples mentioned earlier, Arbitrum, as the L2 with the largest TVL, has strong cash flow as a consensus, and dogwifhat’s hat is also a consensus. What kind of token does the market want? What kind of token does the market buy into? I understand this from the perspective of utility and speculation.
Utility
Utility can be divided into several types:
One is utility based on expected future returns. For example, you need to stake 32 ETH to become an Ethereum validator and earn about 4.5% APR.
Another type is token-gated utility: you must hold a certain number of tokens or NFTs to be allowed to access a community or use a protocol.
The nature of some infrastructure projects prevents them from giving tokens strong utility. For example, most L2 tokens currently only have governance utility or narrative “speculative” properties.
Speculation
Retail investors believe that a token has the potential to rise in price, for various reasons such as direction, product, narrative, etc. The market forms a collective force to support the token’s price.
For users, narratives are often the most direct and easily understandable point. Many Infra projects face the problem that their concepts are too abstract and difficult to understand – it is unrealistic to expect every user to understand the principles of cryptography like ZK and FHE or similar developer tools and their benefits. But we can try to convey some simple information, such as abstracting them into a string of letters or phrases: ZK, FHE, Restaking, etc.
Trace mentioned two good points in “Unbundling Attention”: “bigness” and “simplicity.” For example, L1 is a timeless narrative in the Crypto world, it is big enough to accommodate a large number of dapps and users. Another example is memecoins, which are the simplest tokens with almost no learning curve. Users buy them solely based on the expectation of price increase, making them quickly occupy users’ mindshare.
I also observed that many restakers in EigenLayer actually don’t know what AVS is, but because EigenLayer has a stake interface and interaction process, it gives them a familiar feeling and makes them more easily accept the Restaking narrative.
4. Closing
More projects and tokens are being rapidly pushed into the market, and users are faced with rapidly changing narratives and a dazzling array of projects. In this playground where everything is accelerated, attention is a scarce resource.
Crypto has developed for nearly a decade, and what users want is no longer just a user-friendly DEX like a few years ago. Today, building a successful Crypto project is more difficult than before.
Regardless, the end game is always about users. Focus on users, think about their needs from first principles. This is my sincere advice to all Crypto entrepreneurs.
