On Friday just gone, I was fortunate enough to co-host a Twitter spaces with The Machinist, where Dan Hughes once again joined. Largely the beneficiaries of a well-timed evening weekly slot, Dan finished in the Lab, then checked-in to debrief the week’s work, and generally decompress with a couple of degen-$hitcoin-founder-radix-evangelical-types…the topic up for discussion this week; Road to Mass Adoption.

Twitter was abuzz with activity beforehand; this was not one to be missed! This is what we have been waiting to hear! Wen Big Red Button, Wen Marketing, Wen Binance, Wen Benance?! It has become a meme. For years we have been collectively wondering about this, and finally, we were going to have it answered; 10+ years of build, summarised neatly in an hour or so, hopefully with a generous dashing of humour, and three take-away learning points…

Except, that wasn’t what happened. What became quickly apparent when we started - it’s a really big fucking question, and a pretty loosely defined one at that. Who are the masses of whom we speak? What counts as mass adoption? Precisely how many roads must a Dan walk down?

And no, I make no apology for dropping that pun in twice. It’s a solid pun, I am getting my mileage from it, and Dylan is a legend.

Definitions

Predictably, we all started contributing to how we get mass adoption. Trouble is, what even is mass adoption? My default position is how to bring over degens from other chains. I’m worrying about the 3%. Dan is thinking about the 97% who don’t currently use crypto. He’s out here playing chess, while I’m playing snakes and ladders.

Of course we do want crypto-literate folk to come across and use radix, and we’re convinced that once they try it, they’ll stick. Barring the evangelists of other faiths who shan’t be converted, there’s probably some truth to this. But there is a much larger pond of non-techies that no-one is fishing in. We all need to start thinking of mass adoption as onboarding these people, not simply eating into whatever market share Ethereum or Solana has. That’s simply adoption. We’re out here playing for all the marbles, remember that.

And with that in mind, we can come up with a framework for approaching this. Rather than a silver bullet, I propose five key areas that we need to consider. A silver revolver if you want to stick to your munition metaphors.

Money

Money needs to be brought into the ecosystem. It’s just that important. We can have the best tech and best wallet and best community and all the bestuses, but without more money in the ecosystem, we are a mere blip on the radar. Builders and users will both gravitate to where the money is as their first point of entry. They will not be clicking on page 2 or 3 of CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko and deep-dive into dozens of chains. They will try one or a few from the top 10 or 20 and if they like it, stick. If they don’t, we may end up losing this person for the foreseeable. Point being, more money needs to be in the ecosystem for people to first be aware of radix, and then try it out. More money finding it’s way into the ecosystem is reliant on…

Logistics

I’m using logistics as a catch-all term for T1 exchanges and bridges. Proper T1 exchanges. Basically, any way that people can get their dollars into the ecosystem. In this case quite literally; US dollars being locked out is obviously a huge barrier to money flowing in. Thankfully, this is something we know is being actively worked on. At the risk of stating the obvious, without the ability for money to flow in, it can’t. Addressing the points of friction for money flowing into the ecosystem is a priority.

Tech

Yes, history is littered with examples of best tech not winning, and everyone loves citing Betamax losing to VHS as the example. However this doesn’t detract from tech mattering. A lot. Tech fucking matters. Thankfully radix has this in abundance. In fact, it is precisely because of the focus on tech that Radix lags behind in other regards; visibility, marketing etc. It should also be noted that solid tech is a fundamental, and exists outside of fads that come and go. Reconciling the trilemma is the long-term play. Having something decentralised, secure, and scalable is exactly how you future-proof yourself. These to varying degrees will work under the hood; the average user probably won’t care much about decentralisation, will only care about security when it’s compromised, and is unaware of the scaling wars. However, it is only with these things functioning that we can grow beyond a glass ceiling that we see limiting older and/or inferior chains. The average user will however care about mobile dApps, which brings us nicely to…

Demographics

We are mostly focussed on the 3% of crypto-literate people, and how we bring them over to Radix. There are however the 97% who are crypto-naive. Of these adults, up to 90% have mobiles. The ability and importance for these people to interact with web3 through a mobile device cannot be overstated. These leaps in tech, and mobile dApps is a leap, affect how and who can interact with a service, product and ecosystem. The advent and availability of mobile phones meant we no longer needed to lay landlines in order to speak with people far away. Satellite internet is currently facilitating a similar transformation; we don’t need those pesky 5G towers, when we can beam internet down from a satellite. We gain the ability to skip a developmental step altogether. Mobile dApps are just this transformative, and open up web3 to those 6 Billion plus people.

We also need to pay attention to under-represented groups. As Dan highlighted, women are a group hugely underrepresented within crypto, make up just over 50% of the population, and yet our collective focus remains on bringing a subset of a subset of a subset; men, existing users, over from Ethereum and Solana. It feels like an easier sell, because these people are already using crypto - but this is a drop in the ocean, to circle back to our original aquatic-based analogies.

Hype - the final factor.

Hype. A sprinkling of magic dust. The X-factor. That sense of excitement with being involved, and FOMO for those who aren’t. It is both that nebulously defined, and that important, that it gets its own paragraph. In its most sustainable form, it is almost always a combination of all the above; big green candles, a superb user experience, new previously unimaginable products working seamlessly and making us wonder how we could ever have lived without. Hype by itself can propel a useless memecoin to billions in value. Incidentally, because a memecoin lacks in the other areas, it almost always plummets straight back down. But that shows just how powerful a force hype is, and we will need it on top of everything else to get to where we want to go.

Summary

For us to collectively think about The Road to Mass Adoption, it’s a good idea for us to first agree on what that goal looks like. Personally, I would be disappointed if Radix topped out with syphoning off a few thousand users from other chains, and nestled neatly within the top 20 platforms. With what we are building, we have to recognise this is truly disruptive, and set out sights higher than existing crypto users. Mass adoption means people who’ve not used crypto before, or held a ledger.

We also need to discard our ever-changing silver bullet of Binance/Big Red Button/Mobile dApps and realise it will be a cocktail of all the rational and quantifiable factors discussed above. This cocktail will include more money in the ecosystem, easier on/off ramps, MFA, TPS tests, and a whole bunch of people who are interacting with defi without realising it. Then yes, in addition to all of this, a sparkle of irrational hype on top - your cocktail arriving to the table before being set ablaze with blue and purple flames.

Looking around the ecosystem, that cocktail is already being mixed.

Cheers.