Preface: Brother, have you been making money for so many years of wallets? No matter bulls or bears, users often ask this question. In fact, what everyone means is: don’t cancel the stall, otherwise what will happen to my coins? I know. So we repeated over and over again that the assets in the wallet are kept by the user himself. As long as the mnemonic is copied, the earth will not be destroyed, and the coins will not be lost.
You can't make money, and burn money first. Like most technical tool products, the road to income generation for wallets is difficult and tortuous. "Do you want to make money?" The three words are the soul torture of all wallet teams.
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Basic functions of blockchain wallet
of course not.
of course not.
With the rapid development of the blockchain world, the basic functions have long been unable to meet the needs of some users, and various expansion functions have emerged as the times require. The built-in accelerator in the wallet is a typical scenario, and friends who often send and receive Bitcoin must be familiar with it. There are still many such scenarios, such as batch transfer, on-chain payment of resources, resource leasing, and some functions of smart contract wallets that have just begun to emerge. An advanced function that digs deep enough into user pain points has a very good charging basis, which has been verified in many scenarios.
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What else can a blockchain wallet do?
Solving payment needs can be regarded as one of the origins of encrypted assets, and this direction has naturally been followed by many teams. In the past, many overseas entrepreneurial teams have made many attempts in this field. However, the income of this type of solution mainly relies on the merchant-oriented settlement platform, which draws a certain proportion of channel fees for each fund received by the merchant through the payment platform, and the proportion is not low. In such a payment scenario, if the C-side wallet is only used as a terminal to complete an on-chain transfer, it is difficult to charge. Some wallets choose to cooperate with visa master to issue bank cards that can be used in the real business world. Cooperating with commercial organizations to issue such bank cards, the wallet as one of the participants in the payment channel and the OTC desk channel can generate income. The Lightning Network is a more decentralized payment solution native to the encryption community. In the Lightning Network ecosystem, if the wallet is a node itself, it can receive some handling fees by providing node services.
However, no matter what the solution is, it has not changed the reality that encrypted assets are only accepted as a payment medium in a very small range, and it is still a bit difficult to make money from this. However, with the rapid development of stablecoins on the chain, a large number of users are rapidly pouring into various payment scenarios, and these users are directly or indirectly bringing income to the wallet, and the growth rate is astonishing.
The production link of encrypted assets (PoW mining) is one of the few fields that can generate stable income in the past ten years, so many institutions have been born in the upstream and downstream of this link, and everyone divides the labor and cooperates to share the cake together. Unfortunately, the wallet is not among them. However, as some important PoS networks began to go online, the production process successfully moved from the real to the virtual. For a while, the Staking economy was in full swing, and everyone flocked to it. Among all the players, the wallet may be the most advantageous track player. More and more PoS networks may be squeezed into the top 30 of CoinMarketCap in the future. The total annual output of these networks can reach the level of tens of billions of dollars, and the wallet here can participate in the node by itself or reverse the flow of the node, and participate in Staking The assets in the platform are docked to expand services such as liquidity, thereby generating considerable income.
The largest piece of revenue comes from ingress services. Open a wallet product in 2016, and then open a wallet product in 2020, and you can probably find the most direct change at a glance, which is the emergence of a large number of extended services based on encrypted assets. With the improvement of experience and the formation of user habits, both centralized and decentralized services are increasingly accepted by users through the guidance of wallets. As a tool for users to manage assets, such expansion services and wallets have a strong coupling effect. (Open Alipay and see how many things are under the button of wealth)
In particular, open financial (DeFi) services are developing rapidly and bursting with great vitality and innovation. As the open financial network continues to mature, a large number of asymmetries between centralized services and decentralized services will be gradually smoothed out, and the advantages of open finance such as security will be fully reflected. Cross-chain technology is also evolving rapidly, and soon the main chains will be connected to form a huge parallel universe on the chain, and various stablecoins and asset on-chain projects will be used as wormholes to open up the two chains of the chain and the off-chain. Parallel universe. A large number of assets and users will enter the chain through these wormholes, forming an on-chain financial world that is countless times larger than it is now.
The wallet is the entrance to this parallel financial world and a guide for people in an increasingly complex decentralized network. Judging from the evolution speed of DeFi and the public chain, this day is actually very close.
Finally, let’s talk about DApp applications with greater coverage. Back to October 2018. At that time, the EOS mainnet had been launched for 4 months and had accumulated a certain number of users on the chain. At this time, several representative DApps with excellent experience attracted everyone's attention and successfully obtained good traffic. At the same time, a large number of development teams also figured out how to develop DApps on EOS. For a time, a hundred flowers bloomed and grew wildly. Countless people exclaimed that the era of DApp is coming, and this grand scene reached its peak in December. It's a pity that the good times don't last long. After the Spring Festival, the entire DApp circle shut down. DApps on EOS perfectly performed the first half of the Gartner Technology Maturity Curve in four months. Seeing him rise up, feasting guests, and seeing his building collapse up.
The reason for the building is complicated, so I won't do too much analysis here. The spring of just a few months is a precious sample in the history of DApp development. Various types of DApps, DEXs, peripheral service teams, security teams, and even hackers have left a lot of footprints in this sample. As the entrance of DApp, the wallet occupies the top position of this subdivided ecological chain. Not only has user activity increased significantly, but all business models that can be seen in traditional Internet portals have appeared in a short period of time and are in short supply. This period of time has even become the spiritual support for some wallet teams to persist in the bear market-you see, we can still make money in our business.
One and a half years have passed, the existing public chain is rapidly evolving, and the new public chain team is also working hard to explore, and the ability level of application developers on the public chain is also rapidly improving, and the pitfalls that everyone encountered in the past are gradually being filled. I am full of confidence that DApp will return to the king one day not too far away.
Summarize the various scenarios mentioned above in one sentence - the beauty of the other side is getting clearer and closer.
We will all be first-generation citizens of this new world. In this world, the wallet is a very special existence, which connects people and chains, the carbon-based world and the silicon-based world. Wallets are not only used to manage your cryptocurrency, but also include ID cards, social security cards, voting rights, financial products, contracts, membership cards, props, lottery tickets, commemorative cards, and more things that have not yet been born. As a container of identities on the chain, a large number of daily behaviors will have a relationship with the blockchain wallet. And even with all our imaginations, we probably can't imagine what the wallet will really evolve in the future and how important it is in everyone's life.
Preview: The second part of the blockchain wallet series "The Future of Wallets – Upheaval is Coming"
