Crypto Onboarding
How to onboard the next billion users into the crypto world? That’s the hot question on web3 Twitter spaces right now.
Bharath T (co-founder, Onmeta)‘s vision for Onmeta is “to bring users into the crypto world and get them participating in this global economy, powered by blockchain.”
Web3’s value proposition is that it is an internet of value, and these values can be leveraged to build organisations and businesses on top of it.
For a user to participate in this new economy, the user has to either create value in the economy by mining or, but not limited to- contributing to a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation(DAO), or has to transfer value from the real world to the crypto world, by exchanging their fiat for cryptocurrencies at exchanges or fiat on-ramp platforms.
Fiat on/off-ramps are widely popular and in demand because the alternative- centralized exchanges- will keep custody of users’ assets. Which means, the user will never actually own the tokens/coins, these exchanges will hold the coins on their behalf, which limits the use cases of these coins to only trading.
Also, creating value as opposed to transferring value is not as efficient (although necessary) because most of us already have some value locked up in real world in the form of “money in the bank” in its most literal sense.
So users want to be able to exchange their fiat to crypto and access their favourite decentralize applications, and the best known way to do it is with fiat on-ramps, which is a platform where an user can buy crypto currencies and deposit it to their own privately held wallets. From there, the users are free to do what ever they want with their crypto assets.
The Broader Problem
Why are crypto currencies better than fiat currencies? Why global economies are better than tribal economies? Why are decentralisation & transparency better than centralisation and opacity in organisations? I think these questions need to be discussed more in the community so that our roadmap is grounded in well-founded ethos.
We also have to educate people and build incentive structures for new users to participate and make the process as seamless as possible.
Investing is the most popular incentive based use cases in crypto; we have seen it with the NFT boom. Other current use cases are access to gated communities, defining ownership and play-to-earn(p2e) gaming.
The Specific Problem
If you want to play a play-to-earn game, you should not go through a process of buying some a native token on an exchange (like 0x, 1inch, Uniswap, etc), creating a wallet, and then transferring these coins to the wallet and then go to another decentralised exchange to swap the native token for the Dapp token. This process has a lot of friction and is tedious for an average user to come and reach a desired outcome.
This is where fiat on-ramp platforms like Onmeta or Moonpay that plug in with Dapps come to use. A user can directly go to the Dapp landing page and pay with fiat(INR/USD/EUR) to get the token to start interacting with the Dapp.
We will surely go through a lot of user onboarding experiments in terms of UX and the general upsides of getting into web3 in the coming years. It is therefore important for the whole ecosystem to acknowledge the problem and be supportive of anyone working on its solutions.