Welcome, and thank you for being part of the MyZucoins community! Let’s get into an interesting piece of crypto, finance, or tech news to stay ahead.
Crypto Needs More Than A Nice App Design: It Needs Products That Solve Problems
When it comes to crypto adoption, it’s not just about improving the user experience (UX).
The real long-term hurdle is creating things that people want, on top of a system.
This isn’t a UX problem; it’s a product-market fit issue to tackle.
Product-market fit is when a product fills a strong market need.
Successful startups have found innovative ways to meet these needs.
Amazon simplified shopping, Facebook made it easy to connect with loved ones, and Tinder expanded our dating pool.
Even with complicated UX, people will use it when a product meets a core need better than existing solutions.
Most of the current crypto offerings have focused on the financial aspect, but this is a hard sell, especially when markets dip.
There’s a big opportunity for crypto developers to create products that meet other human needs like community, belonging, and entertainment.
For example, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are already meeting some people’s need for belonging by creating new social communities based on asset ownership.
Onchain media is another promising area, offering new entertainment options and a chance for people to invest in the content they consume and create.
In August 2023, a staggering 94.5 million NFTs were minted across Ethereum and its layer two scalability protocols alone.
The key to mainstream crypto adoption lies in expanding beyond finance to meet a wider range of human needs.
The potential is vast but requires more experimentation and a focus on creating solutions that are only possible with crypto. Read more here.
Amplifying The Crypto Effect: Various Forces
Why Crypto? What Is The Point?
Applying Crypto To Solve Real Business Issues
A key takeaway from the previous content is the need for crypto products to shift their focus from merely improving the user experience (UX) to actively creating products that meet people’s core needs.
When it comes to Splitchain, the network powering Zucoins, the first step is to solve fundamental system protocol issues, which the Zucoins team continues to check off in spades.
The next step is to open-source the technology, allowing it to be applied it to many more use cases.
It turns the product’s network into a protocol platform where others can build on top of it.
Why build on top of it?
Splitchain does a huge amount of work behind the scenes to take care of the underlying complexities, cryptographic handshakes, and truth-finding techniques behind the scenes for you.
The deceptively simple Zucoin wallet app hides a ton of mechanisms happening behind the scenes.
Many transactions between users complete up to 14 steps that, for the most part, are hidden away.
The next step is to expand and apply the Splitchain protocol to all kinds of use cases, once the foundation has been completed.
Immediate industries that Splitchain can be applied to are those that require a high degree of accuracy and transparency, whilst offering a simpler way to manage these factors.
For example, logistics, where tracking and monitoring activity across separate mutual interests in a large supply chain, would be a potential fit for Splitchain.
Of course, applying the technology to the financial industry is a no-brainer, as much of the crypto industry has taken to this side of it, though the volatile sub-category of speculation has caught too much mainstream attention in recent years.
Being able to settle transactions quickly is also a key upside that can be applied to many areas.
Paying for goods or completing ownership transfers of assets is an easy use case too.
Not to mention, in general, businesses complete all kinds of transactions every day.
From financial movements to employee task completions, to on-site job quotes, to client meetings, to project management todos—all of these tasks could be placed onto an undeniable, provable network such as Splitchain to hold each party responsible for their efforts.
It could be particularly effective to help coordinate the growing amount of remote workers.
Employees could sign off each task they do, directly on the system, using a cryptographic proof that ensures that the employee did the task assigned.
It creates a direct trail of responsibility to identify hard-working staff and conversely, would expose inefficient employees who attempt to skate under the radar, piggybacking off the work of others—a common problem experienced by most companies.
Detection is the hard part and it’s where Splitchain could help.
Applying Splitchain to private corporations, or even more so, public companies with highly regulated responsibilities, could simplify many reporting processes to their shareholders.
It’d make quarterly or annual performance reviews far easier and more efficient to review.
These are just quick examples, but the point is to show that much of the commercial world, at the very least, operates on transactions of some sort—not necessarily financial, but all kinds of transactions that require provable trust.
It’s why building Splitchain to be fast, simple, permissionless (anyone can use it or join in), low-cost (no fees), and a fundamental transaction building block is so important.
Splitchain is the infrastructure that reliably proves whether something happened the way it should, without trusting a single third party. And without many of the inherent issues facing traditional blockchains.
While the Zucoins team has their own goals to achieve with the platform once the system is open source and as their march towards decentralization continues, there are no shortages of real-world, cost-reducing, and efficiency-improving areas for Splitchain to be applied to.
This, by far, excites us more than any kind of day-trading speculation.
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All the best,
Peter & Rob
MyZucoins
Disclaimer: Of course, this is not advice, financial or otherwise. It’s also important to consider the risks and challenges associated with any potential benefits.