Why mobile hardware matters for web3 adoption

Transcript

GM GM welcome back to another episode of web3 Academy the leading place for businesses entrepreneurs and creators to learn how to use web3 Tech to better your business to improve business models and to build thriving communities it's the new year happy New Year everybody welcome back hope you had a lovely New Year's a great holiday with your friends and families and your loved one and I hope you're as fired up as I am about 2023. we've got a very exciting year ahead of us we got some really exciting things happening here at web3 Academy we can't wait to tell you about a little

bit of alpha hint wink win now nudge today we're going to be talking about mobile hardware and why mobile Hardware is the key to web3 adoption for the masses this is my one of the predictions that was made in our 2023 predictions list that was created by our team and go back and take a look at that listen to that podcast if you want it's about five or six episodes ago but this is a prediction that I myself believe very strongly in mainly because when we think about it when we think about every major Tech evolution of the internet that has happened it's all connected to Hardware

of some sort with web one it was the explosion of the personal home computer the desktop computer which all of a sudden allowed millions of people to be online and to be accessing Tech in a new way and then we had web one which was so available to all of us for web 2 it was the mobile phone the mobile phone was the Tipping Point that allowed social to grow that allowed apps to grow in this new form of connection that we had never experienced before because all of a sudden we had the internet in our pocket so for web 3 we believe the same thing and that is

that web3 has its Hardware moment coming in this next year in 2023 and we're going to talk about why we believe that and what that looks like and gonna talk about four or sorry three specific projects that are either launched or close to launching which are really focused on mobile hardware for web 3. so let's jump in so if you've been in web3 for a while you've obviously heard us talk about mainstream adoption we talk about it all the time what's going to get us to mainstream adoption you know sure it's fun for all of us web 3 people to sit around and talk about the

tech and all the exciting things that are happening in web3 but what's the point if we don't get billions of people onto the tech on chain into using this technology and what's going to actually achieve this mainstream adoption well some say it's the ux others blame it on scams and it's certainly ironic that a an immutable transparent cryptographic technology is held back by security flaws but it's true and here at web Theory Academy we believe that a combination of ux security and the complexity of the space is what's holding people back so how can we improve these and eventually on board the rest of the world into web3 well we think it's going to come down

Two web three friendly mobile Hardware So today we're going to break this down we're going to look at the current problems with Hardware how mobile Hardware can support web3 adoption and developments that are in happening in the space so first let's talk about the problems the problems with mobile Hardware in the age of accelerating Innovation so we're living in this age of exponential Innovation but Innovations mostly come through software due to it being extremely scalable and relatively lower cost when compared to development of hardware also much shorter time to develop software than it takes to develop Hardware said in another way Hardware is

both costly and difficult to develop and its production relies on a long supply chain of chips and many physical parts from many producers around the world this is also the main reason why we haven't seen AI tech only just become widely available because we haven't had the necessary computing power to make it available for mainstream use I saw a stat teachers the other day that chat GPT is costing them three million dollars a day so there's an idea of just how much the hardware is taking in order to run the servers in order to run the software for chat GPT is millions of

dollars and so that it gives the idea of the hardware is difficult to develop so now we've seen the proliferation of AI because it's suitable for web 2 Hardware or at least we're starting to see the proliferation but web3 and blockchain however they're not there yet so we need to develop web3 Hardware from the ground up because it's fundamentally different from what we currently have and while we do have web3 friendly Technologies such as Ledger the current ux isn't suitable for onboarding mainstream users and it still relies heavily on web 2 technology plus it is nowhere near as secure as it should be however we're starting to see adoption and a recognition for the need for secure user friendly web3 Hardware

when we say mobile Hardware it doesn't necessarily mean a typical mobile phone we're referring to any device that can easily fit in your back pocket but why is that important well we believe that over the next few decades everything will become digitized we're talking about money I mean it basically already is but you know the next level of crypto money on crypto rails and on chain I'm talking about identification documents you won't need to carry around your ID anymore your passport anymore it'll just be on your wallet your digital wallet event tickets ownership documents everything that is you own that we need to prove verifiable ownership of will be on chain and it'll be connected to your

crypto or web3 wallet now it's natural as a progression from the desktop in the early stage of the internet to the mobile phone that put the internet in everyone's pocket and so that's when we saw web one go from desktop web 2 to mobile and web 3 now we're gonna see wallet and where is this wallet going to exist well we believe it needs to be stored on a blockchain of some form which blockchain is Up For Debate but we need web3 friendly mobile Hardware that can speed up this transition we need web3 friendly wallets that enable us to interact with the blockchain in a secure and user-friendly way now these might be

on your phone it might be in the form of a crypto wallet like a ledger only time will tell how that will play out but here's what we know the four ways that we need to work to improve this transition is we need to improve the user experience of web3 we need to give owners a chance to flex their identity we need to allow web through technology to be more scalable and we need to improve security during web 3 interactions and so how are we going to achieve these four things well improve ux right now web3 is fragmented AF to say the least you've got hundreds of crypto wallets and finding new product protocols and dapps is very unintuitive good luck you're basically on your own

plus once you do find them you have to constantly sign in with your wallet anytime you'd like to access them and you're often blind signing because nobody knows what those signatures mean because the ux is so poor right now you're signing something that just gives you a bunch of characters and you're forced to just trust it so instead dead web3 friendly mobile Hardware will give you access to all your favorite web3 applications all in one place now in 2022 most people access the applications they use daily through their mobile phones more and more people are engaging in e-commerce through mobile people are spending most of their social media time on mobile roughly 55 percent of Americans even prefer banking through a

mobile app compared to 31 preferring to use a PC browser so you can see the trends are heading in the way of mobile and we know this for a while but it's important to recognize this is the way in which we interact in the internet and it makes sense because mobile apps are the most they're much more user friendly than using the web which you often use through your browser on your desktop now on top of this a mobile device can easily access identity and ownership documents so you can share them if need be just imagine pulling out your laptop at an airport to check in to approve your identity it's ridiculous not going to happen and that's why web3 friendly

mobile devices will drive true adoption of this technology I mean just imagine the opposite scenario in five years maybe not even you're going to be crossing a border you're not going to pull out a physical copy of your passport you're going to pull out your web3 wallet whatever device that's on whether it's on a separate wallet or whether it's on your phone you're going to use that as your passport it'll be on that device because that's actually more verifiable than the physical passport which can be easily created fraudulently and copied and whatnot next up Flex Appeal Ian Rogers the chief experience officer at Ledger put it perfectly in a recent interview with

Carly Riley from overpriced jpegs he said when you buy an Apple phone you're not buying a piece of Hardware you're buying into an ecosystem you're buying an experience and the complexity of the digital asset world is similar buying a piece of Ledger Hardware isn't just a commodity it's an experience that brings you a secure digital asset experience to your phone now Ledger has arguably been the top company when it comes to crypto Hardware wallets but until now their offerings have focused more on the actual utility I.E security rather than creating an experience around the device and that's why we're so excited about their upcoming release of The Ledger Stacks we'll get into more of that later but if you know anything about humans we

know that we love to flex our Apple phones objectively better than Samsung's maybe depends who you ask but in terms of their Tech and their speed and their abilities probably not so why do they dominate smartphone sales in the U.S well it comes down to the experience that Apple sells its audience sophistication Innovation and luxury now if people begin to flex their web3 mobile Hardware it could easily be the reason we see web3 go mainstream it all comes down to how seamless the devices ux is better ux equals half your customers equals an opportunity to flex equals onboard new people because people see that you're flexing with this new

device that everybody else wants equals an experience that's good for web3 ux which equals more Flex devices you get the idea it's cyclical now let's talk about scalability and distribution I mentioned it already but it begs repeating we live in a mobile first world a staggering 92 percent of people use a mobile phone to access the internet most people do their online shopping through mobile rather than any other device we spend most of our online time through mobile devices and sixty percent of the world's web traffic comes from mobile devices and that number is only growing every year and that's a win for web 3 because if we can figure out web3 mobile we stand in an extremely high chance of going mainstream you can

see it demonstrated in these statistics now while there are a bit of data they still illustrate the extreme adoption rate of mobile Hardware so if we look at Apple's Revenue by Source in 2006 the revenue is 19 billion dollars and it was split between the iPod Max and other accessories with the iPod being 40 max mean 38 percent and other being 22 percent now fast fast forward to 2016 the revenue is 216 billion dollars and I realize the stat is a few years old but the stat has not changed dramatically is the breakdown of their revenue

63 of Apple's revenue is from the iPhone 63 11 from Mac 11 from Services 10 from iPad and 5 from other just gives you an idea of the power of mobile Hardware which has just grown substantially exponentially in the past decade so we've established that mobile devices are ubiquitous and increase the potential scale of web3 acceptance but mobile Hardware is also an excellent way to distribute and find new applications in fact between 2019 and 2020 alone there were over 250 million apps downloaded each day and that number is

only increasing every day 250 million apps downloaded some paid some free well why is that so easy why is that so important because the discoverability of these apps is what makes everybody download them there's these amazing two incredible marketplaces mostly there's the app store which dominates the space and then there's the Google Play store which dominates the Android side so you've got these great marketplaces which have incredible ux where you can go and read reviews and see top ratings and see what's trending and easily see prices and have a trusted Source where you know you're downloading something

that you can trust because it's been verified by this Marketplace these are very important factors in the growth of apps over the last decade and a half and this is important because when we consider consider the discoverability of web 3 protocols and adapts right now it's very difficult there is no dap store you can't buy dapps on Apple right now so once we flip the switch on that and we have a seamless ux to discover decentralized apps oh my gosh we go in gangbusters folks

next up let's talk about better security now you might be thinking even if my whole life becomes digitized I can still do everything I need through my app my laptop right well yes and no the ux of completing crypto payments and interacting with different dapps currently requires you to use browser extensions this creates obvious challenges and limitations for Developers not to mention that it's much easier to prove your identity through face recognition on your phone in the future you'll be able to pay for your morning coffee with stable coins from your phone just like you currently do with Apple pay it'll be seamless it'll take zero effort and it'll cost the business less because they won't have to pay credit

card transaction fees like they do now the fees will be less so win-win for everybody and the transaction will be instant they won't have to wait for the transaction thankfully credit card transactions are pretty quick but when you look at other forms of transactions that happen off crypto rails oh my gosh you're talking days weeks sometimes for financial transactions to happen that's tough if you're running a business especially if you're an entrepreneur now if crypto and web 3 truly eat the world like we think they will most of your life will be on chain money your identity your everything you own will be proved on chain

and if you want to use and share this information securely it must be done through the right Hardware because if someone is able to hack your device you could lose everything which is a big reason why we have low adoption of web3 net right now there's a fear it reminds me of the early days of e-commerce a lot of people particularly older Generations or the mass Market we're not willing to make purchases online because of trust mainly they didn't trust the online retailers yet they were afraid of getting scammed and losing their money well does that sound familiar yeah

that's what most people think about crypto right now but when we have Hardware that your mom and your dad and your aunt your uncle and your friends can all see you pull it out you make a payment at a bar to buy a round of beers and you do so in crypto they're gonna go oh my gosh that was so easy that was so simple and you trust it and it's safe well duh light bulbs are going off all over the room and we're going to have much more friendly conversations about crypto than we do right now that is fo shout and so that's really the problem right now if you want to use and share

this information securely we need the right hardware and our current blend of web 2 Hardware it just doesn't reach the necessary level of security to completely protect our on-chain activities blockchains are extremely secure but unfortunately the current midpoints the connection points we use to access blockchain are not that's why we need web3 first mobile hardware and the good news is they are coming unlock protocol is the nft membership protocol for web3 Content subscriptions Community Access event tickets are all forms of memberships one of the most common business models for creators and

entrepreneurs today building an nft membership opens many new possibilities for your members everything from tailored multi-platform experiences to the ability to sell an unfinished subscription on secondary markets these are things just not possible in web however in order for this business model to work creators need nfts which are time-bound or have built-in recurring payments unlock protocol does this for your nfts that are yet with a few simple steps you can create your own nft contract without code what WordPress has done for websites unlock protocol is doing for membership nfts if you're an

nft Creator you can't rely on royalties as they are likely going to zero you need recurring Revenue you need unlocked at web3 Academy We Believe nft memberships are the future of business and community and that's why we decided to build an unlock learn more at unlock Dash protocol.com what are the current developments in web3 and mobile Hardware right now there's a few options there are potential contenders for helping us go mainstream some are still in development While others are close to distribution or have minimal blockchain Integrations currently active so first up the Solana Saga this is Solana's mobile

phone and it's been hotly anticipated with an estimated shipping time of early 2023. we'll see how early it comes we all know Hardware is difficult to make now this web 3 Centric device promises the ability to run dapps and other decentralized applications natively on the phone without the need for a separate computer or device it will also feature a hardware wallet for securely storing and managing cryptocurrency assets a secure Enclave for storing sensitive data and a decentralized identity system tired of signing transactions in your browser wallet Solana's Saga will allow you to do it with a simple fingerprint that's the type of ux we need for web3 to go mainstream besides its web 3

Integrations the Solana Saga also packs some powerful Hardware which includes 12 gigabytes of RAM a 50 MP cam megapixel camera plenty of screen space for comfortable viewing and the latest Snapdragon processor now is the Solana Saga all of a sudden going to take over the phone market no clearly not because most users are not looking for crypto wallets right now this solves a problem for a small amount of the population this solves a problem for the current 5 to 10 million active users in crypto and nfts now that number is growing and

as that number grows this is the type of phone which has a wallet a native wallet built into it which allows you to access your crypto assets securely is exactly what we need next up The Ledger stacks The Ledger Stacks announcement recently is exactly what actually sparked us to write this deep dive and for good reason Ledger has many years of experience in building impregnable Hardware that keeps your assets safe at all times but now they're turning their attention to the Hardware's ux pleasure Stacks features a Sleek Palm size touch screen that's the perfect replacement for your wallet when the world goes digital

joking aside Ledger puts Security First so much so that they've never had a security breach that means any of the 500 plus tokens if using The Ledger Live app or 5 000 tokens if using a third party wallet are safe and sound at all times like Solana's Saga Stacks is designed to be a user-friendly interface for interacting with decentralized applications and web3 Technology it includes a number of features that are designed to make it easy for you to manage your digital assets including a wallet Marketplace and tools for managing and tracking event Investments however The Ledger Stacks does require you to connect it to a smartphone or computer through Bluetooth before you can use it

so you can see what's happening here is this question of Are We unbundling Hardware so what we've seen over the past several decades is the bundling of Hardware where now basically we have a phone that is also our computer that also is our current is our wallet stores our credit cards on it which we can use to pay so we have bundled a lot of things into one but I think what we're going to see over the next decade is the unbundling because I don't think that the major phone companies Apple and Android are going to be quick to become web3 native and for good reason as I said before the

masses aren't looking for that that's not a problem that the masses have yet so what we're going to have is for the next little while we're gonna have I believe separate crypto wallets such as The Ledger Stacks which is where we carry all of our digital assets and then we're also going to have our phone long-term most likely those two things become bundled back together again and we'll see who dominates when that happens the third development is the nothing phone now on its own the nothing phone has been hyped up as one of the top developments in the smartphone space in fact time even recognized the phone as one of the best inventions of 2022 but recent news about the phone's integration with polygon is what caught

our attention there's been no official announcement about the extent of blockchain Integrations with the nothing phone one but their website does mention native nft Gallery functionality which is not a ton to be honest when we think about blockchain tech and what we want but polygon has also shared that it will enable features to others in this list which are cryptographically secured ID verification access to dafs and digital assets and more now when these features will arrive we can't say but we do know that everything polygon touches turns to gold outside of that the nothing phone one features an extremely unique design promises a smooth user experience and

offers an open ecosystem for third-party development a perfect fit for web3 so right now when we talk about web3 mobile Hardware we're sort of stuck in the middle we're stuck in between a rock and a hard place on one hand web 3 natives are seeing the glaring issues with custodial wallets these are wallets controlled by centralized entities such as FTX binance coinbase they know that we know that we can't trust these entities with their Investments but the ux these platforms provide is far superior to what we can currently achieve with mobile Hardware now I shouldn't say we can't trust these FTX was obviously an unfortunate situation however I do believe that

coinbase binance and others in the space are trustworthy and Recent research into their Holdings and their glottalization have shown that they are well collateralized and legit in what they do so after the post-implosion dust settles on FTX many people will go back to centralized entities and the cycle will continue on the other hand we have people looking at crypto from the outside and what do they see billions of dollars being siphoned out of web3 through hacks and scams headlines talk about the most recent hacker scam millions of dollars we also have plenty of web3 newbies getting wrecked because centralized entities are often the only way to onboard or because blind signing

through a browser extension wallet is just really not the greatest ux right or clicking on links on your desktop that take you to phishing scams where that browser is also connected to your wallet allows you to have your assets stolen so there's so many issues that are all really caused by the hardware it's really confusing to interact with web3 so even as a web3 native it can be difficult to understand what permissions are particular or particular signature is giving and to who web3 mobile Hardware has the potential to change that it has the potential to make

interactive with web3 as seamless as checking your email as seamless as interacting with online banking through your app and when that happens off to the Moon we go and let's be clear this isn't five years away this is very close these products are already in Market or coming to Market in this year we're on the Tipping Point everybody get excited about 2023 we got a big year ahead folks I hope you're going to stick with us here at web3 Academy all year we got some exciting things coming at you this year some big developments of how we are going to be keeping you on top of web3 and that starts with web3 Academy Pro

which is our new on-chain analysis business reports these are going to be reports that we write based upon on-chain analysis so this is our opportunity that we've never had before when we think about business right now we want to look at business we want to assess the profitability of a business the current movement of a business in terms of products the engagement of users in a business we gotta wait till quarterly reports come out from public companies and private companies we can't even get that data but now that we're on chain that data is readily available to us if we are looking at any web3 native

company and here at web3 Academy we're going to start to write some very deep dive reports focused on specific projects answering the questions that we all want to know the answer to in order to develop the business models that we need to then teach the masses how to use web3 as a Creator as an entrepreneur as a business so if you haven't already signed up go check it out in the show notes below web3 Academy Pro is launching very soon and we've got a special offer right now for anybody who signs up in the next few weeks so don't miss out on that you can get in from the ground floor and you can save yourself some money but also make

sure you're on top of on-chain analysis which is going to be huge over the next year thanks so much for listening everybody once again happy New Year I hope you had a wonderful start to 2023 so far let's make it killer let's make it big let's go thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of

markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one