Have you ever tried to send funds to your friend in Syria or Nigeria with Stripe or Paypal? Then you will get what I mean.

Incredibly, crypto is the first payment system that broke down the walls of international payments for everyone regardless of where they live: lower barrier of entry and incredible speed.

Indeed, it is a game-changer.

At the same time, I have met people who do not take the idea of crypto seriously. You might ask, “C’mon, everyone sees how easy this system is, why would anyone not like it?”

I am a crypto-native, but I must also agree that these people who don’t take crypto seriously are not entirely wrong.

I am mainly writing this for my fellow builders, so we can build what more people will take seriously. This is more like mainstream feedback we all can use to build better products and a saner ecosystem.

The Parallel of Ponzi and Meme Economy

This is the pattern of ponzi programs: people rush into it, so they can cash out and dump on others. So the first set of people gain by using the last sets as exit liquidity.

Unfortunately, this same pattern powers some crypto projects at the moment. They claim to have some utilities, which are either unrealistic or even worthless.

Then they pump millions into these tokens to attract people. As people buy into it, a point will come when demand will stop, and the token will no longer be worth anything.

Some call this the meme economy, but we all know it is extremely fraudulent and simply a pyramid scheme.

Yes, some traders often gain from these meme projects because they are after their bags. But from any ecosystem perspective, I do not fancy the idea of meme tokens; they misrepresent us to the wider world.

Frequent Cases of Security Breaches

Anyone building a financial product in any industry should be security-minded, whether Web3 or Web2.

However, the cases of hacks in Web3 are way too much. Do hacks happen in Web2? Yes, but the number is not close to Web3’s.

From a financial perspective, people put their money where they trust. To be honest, who would want to put their life savings in an industry where they can wake up tomorrow and someone would have stolen everyone’s funds?

That is why some people will always prefer to keep their funds in banks where they are double-sure it will be safe.

People don’t really care about decentralization or any grammar we cook up, they care about the overall safety of their funds.

They want to come back in the next 6 years and see their funds intact. People want financial security, they can’t play with it.

As a founder of a crypto product, work hand-in-hand with nerdy and insanely good security researchers to secure your DApp. You owe your users that duty of care.

Transaction-related Frictions

I am a Technical Content Manager in a company where I also have the authority to pay the content creators I manage.

I can remember a month when I wanted to pay a staff from my wallet, and I couldn’t because I could only pay gas fees with ETH.

In my mind, I wondered, “Since I have USDC in this wallet, why then can’t I simply pay the gas fee with USDC?”

I mean, isn’t that the similitude of what banks do?

This is my feedback for builders: build products that are easy to use. It is that simple.

Feedback to Get Better

As I mentioned earlier, I mainly wrote this for other founders to build products people can trust and easily use.

I believe crypto will go mainstream in the future. And no, the memecoin projects won’t take us to the limelight.

Crypto products that are safe and easy to use will take us far. I am not a bystander, I am building too, so—like I said—this is a note to other passionate builders.