I’ve been building and investing in the consumer lane of crypto for nearly a decade. From product roadmap to go to market strategy, I've helped founders navigate constant obstacles, but the most recurring issue stems from where to start - prioritizing an existing market or leveraging crypto to catalyze new behaviors and create new markets.
One reality that we can all admit today is that crypto needs to establish its value beyond cyclical trends. This happens by focusing on specific crypto use cases that captivate niches and are eventually normalized. From a developer perspective, this means concentrating less on broader market trends and more towards establishing vectors – actions catalyzed by your product that create unique pathways. The goal here is to build habits that transcend, and eventually drive market rhythms.
To induce this, you can’t just slap or integrate blockchains into something and expect it to be compelling. Simply, this presumes that the role of this technology is just to support existing behaviors versus shepherd new ones. But that is not the case. The action driven by this technology is the hook, and thus influences how we behave in relation to these experiences.
This pathway isn’t unique to crypto. For example, two major platforms of the 21st century sparked a behavioral change, leveraging on demand offerings to shift an entire programmable market–
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Netflix: We don’t want episodic media, we binge
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Spotify: We don’t buy records. Heck, we don’t buy music.
In these cases, the new means of consumption weren’t going to be pioneered by the incumbents– the incentive to experiment wasn’t worth cannibalizing their existing business. And technically, you weren’t able to integrate a Netflix experience in linear television or Spotify in the record store. But by capturing user attention within its environment, these two companies were able to showcase why this new behavior is desirable and soon, the eventual status quo. To be fair, ideas work in an instant, and the development of technologies are necessary before other technologies could take flight. But I believe infra technologies are creating new vectors in crypto, we just need to be mindful of where our attention goes today.
This is why for crypto, especially applications, founders need to cultivate behaviors within their own platform to prove that these experiences are undeniable. Unfortunately, for most crypto today, these habits have become too anchored on existing market cycles. Just look at NFTs in 2021 and Memecoins in 2024. This technology absolutely drives new consumer behaviors (NFTs for digital ownership, Memecoins for capital formation), but the attention gets gravity pulled towards an ephemeral social trend. Mainly because the existing platforms where these innovations are developed are actively doubling down on capturing the cycle versus being long term (see: OpenSea and Pump.fun). Being mindful of the habit (action) versus the trend (market) should enable founders to discover what else can be built off this emerging behavior. The faster a trend explodes, the faster it also dies. And thus opportunity lost.
Today, crypto puts a heavy emphasis on social copying versus forming habits. We can’t help admiring things that other people admire. And we’ve seen a disproportionate advantage as it relates to the awareness that certain protocols or applications can generate based on financial momentum versus merit. Tony Sheng wrote a great piece years back on turning speculators into users. But taking it a step further, the relationship between buyers and users today is a feature, not a bug. And one which founders can select whom they want to target and how. While tokens are a draw, and a critical component of crypto networks, the unlocking of behaviors is also a catalyst to drive usage further than ever before.
Crypto products overly benefit from network effects more than traditional products due to their permissionless nature. And to leverage the power of a network, you first need to acknowledge why your customers are there in the first place. Forming habits through crypto native behaviors enables you to control your customer value, whereas copying brings you into environments with an audience you have little or no control.
Habits Formed
In 2021, I wrote that crypto has the ability to drive 24/7 markets for everything. Just as Coinbase turned crypto financial markets into a 24/7 industry for the masses, I believed this behavioral influence would spill over into other industries where consumers were on the forefront. By removing spatial confines, more individuals would be able to contribute to the passions and products they love most, whenever they want. While many crypto projects are anchored on this belief, the real impact is how this evolves industries that felt impenetrable. Low and behold, last week the Nasdaq announced that they plan to launch 24 hour trading for US Stocks.
In 2023, I wrote that for crypto to cross the chasm, it needs to be a familiar "place to be", similar to the web and being online. It will need to become an information-place where everybody has to be. But what are the unique and beneficial properties of this place? How does it differ from 'online.' What can you do there that you cannot do anywhere else? I argued that the simple answer is buying and selling. The blockchain is the only place where you can buy, sell and collect information objects. While we’re still on our way to proving this at scale, momentum has moved beyond digital currencies into tokenized real estate, environmental assets and commodities. This past January, Larry Fink of Blackrock urged the SEC to rapidly approve asset tokenization.
Just as crypto broke through the intangible confines of 9-5 versus 24/7, the same goes for presumed geographical limitations. By servicing customers in need of options for payments, credit and lending, companies are showcasing that leveraging crypto primitives can provide solutions for faster payments and working capital today. In a similar formula, I believe these new behaviors will drive network effects outside of those geographies and revolutionize how these businesses are conducted globally. Through this, we see that crypto behaviors can catalyze new standards and raise the bar of what people are willing to accept. We saw this recently with the acquisition of Bridge by Stripe, and Iron by Moonpay. Looking at the TCG Crypto portfolio (disclosure, TCG Crypto led investments in both Sphere and Jia) companies like Sphere and Jia chose to first introduce their platforms to businesses and consumers who weren’t able to service basic financial needs. Sphere starting in LatAm and Jia in Kenya and the Philippines.
While I believe crypto can eventually scale by enhancing existing consumer behaviors, the opportunity at hand is to remain focused on catalyzing new ones. Yes, crypto can be integrated within our existing apps and platforms, but then we’re left with the question “why are our customers here today?”. And though many of these behaviors are niche at the moment, I believe the consumer unlock potential is so large that many will become the norm. As that continues to play out, integrating these behaviors will become more obvious just as we saw with oAuth and social share. But the platforms need to be proven out first.
So to understand crypto’s impact, don’t focus on how crypto can fit into the broad use platforms of today. Focus on the behaviors catalyzed by blockchain, that can become so habitual that it forces others to react and respond to how they manage their business tomorrow. This is how crypto scales.