Polymarket's monthly transaction volume exceeds 100 million yuan. How to build a top crypto consumer application

Original title: Consumer Crypto

Original author: Nick Tomaino , founder of 1Confirmation

Original translation: Ismay, BlockBeats

Editor's note: Recently, with the success of crypto applications such as pump.fun, Polymarket, and Catizen in market adoption, many people even claim that issuing coins is useless and they have to look at the flow of money. The author of this article, Nick, founder of 1Confirmation, has expanded from the deep technology and financial fields of the past decade to many fields such as news, politics, sports, health/fitness, music, podcasts, live video, etc. These applications will become one of the most useful and valuable technologies ever. By reviewing the experience of participating in multiple successful consumer crypto applications, four important lessons are shared to help us understand how to seize opportunities, stick to beliefs, and achieve breakthroughs in the ever-changing market.

My strongest belief about the next decade is that crypto applications will permeate every aspect of culture. The last decade was about deep tech and finance, but in the next decade we will see crypto consumer applications collide with news, politics, sports, health/fitness, music, podcasts, live video, and more. These applications will be among the most useful and valuable ever.

It seems to be the contrarian view among capital allocators who continue to pour a lot of money into unoriginal, zero-sum products. While the timeline hypes the 69th scalable L1 and yield-generating stablecoins, developers are quietly working on products that will drive new consumer behaviors, helping us reach 1B+ users as quickly as possible and benefit the world.

I have learned a lot from being involved in many of the consumer applications that have successfully combined crypto and culture and attracted new users over the past decade (such as @coinbase, @opensea, @Polymarket, @dYdX, etc.). If you're thinking about the next generation of top consumer crypto apps, here are four lessons that may be useful to you:

It won't happen immediately, so focus on something you believe in, not just making money, and stick with it for years. Polymarket has been looked down upon many times, but founder @shayne_coplan and team always believed that prediction markets could bring more truth to the world. They encountered many obstacles along the way that would have made most people give up, but a belief in something deep, beyond money, helped them persevere. Polymarket completed over $423 million in trading volume in 2024 and played a major role in the 2024 US presidential election. Belief and persistence will eventually pay off.

The intersection of purists and tourists is key. Coinbase has deftly sat at the intersection of purists and tourists for over a decade. If a product is too purist, it will remain niche and never break out. There may be a small group of people who have deep historical knowledge and appreciate nuance who love it, but building for purists limits the size of the market. If a product is too touristy, people will love it for a while and then leave just as quickly. Easy come, easy go. In 2012, @brian_armstrong made an early decision to offer custodial wallet services to users, believing that non-custodial wallets were not conducive to mass market growth. Today, Coinbase is a public company with a market cap of over $50 billion because of this decision.

Dive into the culture of your users and the market. When Opensea launched in 2018, other NFT marketplaces raised more money and had more high-profile investors. Opensea won because @dfinzer and @xanderatallah didn’t care about false prestige or creating a false narrative for the company, they just focused on building a useful product. They talked to every NFT creator, went to every NFT event, and understood the culture better than their competitors. Don’t worry about the surface narrative, dig deep, and you’ll outlast those who play the surface game.

Block out the existing tribal noise and create your own tribe. Truly useful applications don’t need to choose and please any existing tribe, they can create their own tribe. dYdX has set an example in this regard. @AntonioMJuliano and team started out in the Ethereum ecosystem, then launched L2 based on Starkex, and then launched the dYdX chain powered by the Cosmos SDK. This will likely become more common in the future. Once you’ve proven the utility of your application, you can go fully autonomous and launch your own chain, rather than giving up a lot of control and value to an existing chain.

The last decade of consumer crypto has been fun, but I think the next decade will be 100 times more fun.

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