The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day |
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JPMorgan's U.K. subsidiary Chase is banning all crypto-linked payments starting Oct. 16, according to an email to customers. "If we think you're making a payment related to crypto assets, we'll decline it," the email read, citing rates of crypto fraud for the move. The block will apply to transactions to and from Chase debit cards and bank accounts. U.K. banks have historically been reluctant to work with crypto providers, such that the Financial Conduct Authority recently facilitated discussions between banks and crypto firms to foster banking relationships. |
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Ben Armstrong, the crypto influencer once known as BitBoy, was arrested and released on bail on Monday following a confrontation with his former business partner, part of which was live-streamed on social media. The Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Department website shows one "Benjamin Charles Armstrong" was arrested for "loitering/prowling" and for "simple assault by placing another in fear." His bond was set at $2,600. BitBoy Crypto, the company Armstrong co-founded, voted unanimously to oust the controversial crypto day trader in August in part due to Armstrong’s alleged substance abuse. |
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The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has sanctioned an Ethereum wallet tied to Jimenez Castro, a Mexican male with ties to the Sinaloa cartel, as a part of a counter narcotics operation. Arkham Research found the blacklisted wallet was first active in January, and interacted with the Binance crypto exchange. In a statement, the U.S. Treasury said crypto was just one of Castro’s tools allegedly used to launder money and “transfer proceeds from illicit fentanyl sales in the United States to Sinaloa Cartel leaders in Mexico." Nine other wallets were sanctioned as part of the narcotics operation. |
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Popular NFT project Pudgy Penguins debuted its Pudgy Toys collection across 2,000 Walmart stores in the U.S. These toys, which have been available online since May and will sell for $2.99-$11.97, come with a unique birth certificate that allows owners to play as digital “Forever Pudgy” characters inside Pudgy World, a metaverse built on the zkSync Era blockchain. Pudgy’s CEO Luca Netz said the deal with the largest retailer in the U.S. “is a testament to the evolution of how consumers engage with brands in the digital era.” |
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(Mike Van Den Bos/Unsplash, modified by CoinDesk) |
Variant Fund co-founder Li Jin writes today's guest column. Discussions about accelerating adoption of crypto often focus on improving UX. The popular thinking goes: web3 products lag behind from a user experience perspective, onboarding poses multiple points of friction, and technological concepts come with learning curves; creating a more seamless experience for using web3 apps will unlock greater adoption.
While improving crypto UX is certainly important, I believe that the more significant and urgent barrier to adoption is building things that people want. Web3 has a product-market fit problem, not a UX problem.
Product-market fit is when a product satisfies a strong market need. For consumer builders, the elegance and challenge in building for consumers is that humans have remarkably consistent needs across time. That’s why Maslow’s hierarchy of needs continues to resonate nearly a century after its introduction, with universal needs ranging from the physiological (food; shelter; clothing) to psychological (belonging; love; entertainment; esteem).
The history of consumer startups is one of continual innovation in solving for human needs in novel ways. Though people often dismiss new consumer apps as incremental innovations in flippant categories (“teens making dance videos”), the truth is that successful startups offer a step-function improvement in enabling people to achieve a core need. Amazon sold us books (and everything else) in just a few clicks, dramatically easing the process of procuring goods. Facebook enabled us to connect with those we care about instantly. Tinder exposed us to an order of magnitude more potential romantic partners than anyone could stumble on in real life.
There is a lot of evidence that when the user benefit is great enough, users are willing to jump through UX hurdles and learn new behaviors, in crypto and beyond. Examples include the first iPhone (which lacked a touch keyboard), the internet itself, and all crypto assets and applications that have had significant adoption to date (NFTs during the last bull market being a primary example). For products that solve a core need, unfamiliar and complicated UX hasn’t been a blocker.
Despite the long list of multifaceted user needs, so far, explorations of the opportunities that crypto can uniquely address have been largely limited to the financial realm. While income is a widespread need, products where income derives from speculation work when the market goes up, but lose their appeal as prices fall. It’s a tough sell, especially when there are alternatives for users to attain income with less risk and uncertainty.
There is an opportunity for crypto builders to build products that better address other human needs, such as belonging, community, and entertainment. What could that look like?
On a small scale, NFT communities and DAOs have satisfied some people’s need for belonging, forging novel social graphs on the basis of asset ownership. To those who say that shared financial interest can’t be the basis for “real” relationships, consider that many of our real-world connections are predicated on ownership, whether that’s neighboring homeowners, startup employees, or Pokémon card collectors. There’s an opportunity to leverage onchain assets as the basis for new communities that solve for belonging, esteem, and connection. In August 2023 alone, 94.5 million NFTs were minted across Ethereum and L2s; as the volume of user activities grows, imagine inferring users’ interests based on onchain actions and exposing connections based on a rich activity history.
Onchain media expands our entertainment options, giving us skin in the game for what we consume and create online. On platforms like Sound.xyz, Friend.tech, and Zora, users can bet on media and creators they believe in, enhancing their experience of the content and turning these networks into financialized games. In a world where all media is incepted as NFTs, there will be a new economic dimension that can enrich our experience of the internet.
These are just starting points for what it could look like for crypto to find product-market fit and address needs beyond just income. There’s room for much more experimentation from here. To achieve widespread adoption and evolve beyond their current niche, crypto products need to enhance the human experience—through solutions that wouldn’t be possible without crypto. Read the full article here. – Li Jin @LiJin18 |
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Future ‘Shock’? Phemex Probably Won’t Be Even Mildly Surprised Phemex, a centralized exchange making moves to partially decentralize, is celebrating Bitcoin’s 15th anniversary by placing a big bet: If the bellwether token is worth $50,000 or more on October 31st, the exchange will pay out 1,000 BTC to Phemex Soul Pass holders. To do the easy math, that’s $50 million. Sure, it’s unlikely that BTC’s dollar-denominated value will double in the short term – but would you bet that much that it won’t? In the more likely scenario that BTC stays in its current $25,000 to $30,000 trading range – where it has been, given a little leeway, since March – Phemex is still giving away 1 BTC. Continue Reading |
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