What is a Consumer Blockchain? Understanding Morph's Vision

At Morph, you’ll see us using the term consumer blockchain quite often. It’s literally in our slogan, first thing you read when visiting our homepage. At first glance, it’s not that difficult to understand. It must mean a blockchain that focuses on the consumer right? Well yes, but there’s a bit more to it. Think of it this way, who is the consumer? Isn’t that everyone? Is every blockchain a consumer blockchain then? 

This is where some added clarification and nuance are helpful. Before we dive deeper, it’s important to note that these are novel concepts, with definitions constantly changing as their underlying technologies and use cases evolve. The goal here is not necessarily to offer a definitive and categorical definition everyone must adhere to, but rather to present Morph’s vision of what consumer blockchain should be. It’s our most fundamental guiding principle after all.

The Internet’s Consumer Revolution

Before we break down our interpretation of consumer blockchain, it’s beneficial to take a step back and examine a historical example. There is of course another technology that draws many parallels to blockchain. The internet, comprised of various sub-technologies and underlying protocols, is a groundbreaking innovation that evolved through phases.

While it was originally an effort to create more efficient communication networks for government and scientific use, it wasn’t long before it became so, so much more. Its far-reaching value for applications beyond its roots soon gave birth to an impressive list of consumer services that have redefined our daily lives:

• Social Media and Messaging: Facebook and Twitter changed how we share our lives with people while WhatsApp and Messenger offered us instant, multimedia-rich communication.
• E-commerce: Amazon and eBay digitalized retail making it possible for consumers to buy virtually anything online. Etsy and Alibaba offered spaces for smaller businesses and artists to reach a global market.
• Online Gaming: MMORPGs united millions of players in interactive virtual worlds, while Steam and mobile apps redefined how games are distributed and accessed.
• Streaming Services: Netflix gave us instant on-demand video content, while YouTube did the same for user-generated content. Similarly, Spotify and Apple Music also converted music to an on-demand product.
• Online Education: With platforms like Coursera and Udemy, attending a physical institution is a thing of the past. Even traditional schools now offer online courses and remote learning through apps like Zoom and Google Classroom.
• Food Delivery: Services like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub made ordering food from local restaurants convenient and quick, bringing meals directly to our doorsteps.
• Cloud Storage: Google Drive and Dropbox provided secure, on-demand storage for our files, enabling easy access and sharing across devices and with others.

Even this extremely limited list, covering a mere fraction of all the consumer industries and services the internet revolutionized or introduced, should offer a clear understanding of what constitutes a consumer service.   

In this context, a consumer is just an everyday individual who uses products and services to enhance their daily life. Most of these modern services employ innovative technologies that serve to simplify, secure, and optimize how we operate or interact with them. Though the internet also has a myriad of other private, enterprise, and government applications, those fall outside the scope of the typical consumer. 

What Exactly is a Consumer Blockchain? 

With a solid understanding of the interplay between revolutionary technologies and a consumer focus, defining Consumer Blockchain requires some simple reframing or recontextualization. We want to maintain the approach of creating services that offer a very straightforward benefit to the average user, enhanced by the fundamental properties of blockchain.  

Just as the internet spawned new industries and revolutionized others through its core features of connectivity, accessibility, and scalability, blockchain-based consumer services must be enhanced by its properties of decentralization, transparency, immutability, and tokenization. 

Let’s refine our understanding by excluding a few types of blockchain services that we do not see as consumer-focused:

• The vast majority of DeFI applications are simply too niche, complex, and speculative, overwhelmingly focusing on financial gains rather than practical daily use. 
• Enterprise and Government solutions such as supply chain management services and voting systems also fail to meet the consumer-focus criteria established above. 

This is not to say these don’t have their place or aren’t helpful to the overall progress of blockchain technologies, but at least for now, we don’t see these offering any direct benefits to the average consumer. 

Examples of Consumer Blockchain Services

As we’ve consistently done throughout this piece, let's once again aid our exploration of this concept by expanding on the precedent set by the Internet. There’s no question that the examples we provided earlier constitute consumer services, but how would these Morph into blockchain-based consumer services? 

• Social Media and Messaging: Imagine you’re a Twitter influencer, except every post you tweet is inherently yours, represented by an NFT that can be gifted, traded, or sold. No company can delete or modify any content you’ve created. For better or worse, your activity or content is permanently recorded. 
• E-commerce: Picture an Amazon where every product has a transparent, verifiable history on the blockchain. You can see exactly where it was made and its authenticity is guaranteed. Payments are secured by smart contracts, ensuring instant, trustless transactions without the need for intermediaries.
• Online Gaming: Imagine playing a game where every item you earn is a unique NFT that you truly own. These items can be traded or sold on open markets, and they retain their value and rarity regardless of changes in the game. Your in-game achievements and assets are secure and transferable across different gaming platforms.
• Streaming Services: Think of a Netflix where every view directly compensates the creators through a transparent blockchain system. Smart contracts ensure that artists receive fair revenue shares instantly, and viewers can tip or pay extra for exclusive content, all without intermediaries taking a cut.
• Online Education: Envision a Coursera where every course completion and certification is securely recorded on the blockchain. Employers can instantly verify your credentials, and you can earn tokens for completing courses, which can be used to pay for further education or traded for other services.
• Food Delivery: Imagine a food delivery service where you can track your meal from farm to table. Blockchain provides transparent information about the origin, handling, and preparation of your food, ensuring quality and safety. Payments are made through smart contracts, guaranteeing prompt and secure transactions.
• Cloud Storage: Picture a Dropbox where your files are stored across a decentralized network, making them secure and resistant to hacking. You retain full ownership and control of your data, which is encrypted and accessible only by you. Payments for storage space are handled through blockchain, ensuring transparency and fairness.

The pattern should be clear, a consumer blockchain service must be enhanced by inheriting one or all of the properties blockchain has to offer. It’s not simply about adding blockchain or NFTs to any service just for the sake of it. It must be meaningful and offer some type of improvement. 

Some don't get it.

This is precisely why some past misguided ventures by traditional or web2 companies have failed. Consider National Geographic’s NFT collection of sunrise photographs. It faced heavy criticism and poor sales, demonstrating a lack of meaningful consumer benefit. Ask yourself this, did this NFT collection create or enhance any existing benefit you were enjoying from National Geographic? Does this company even have products with collectible value or the type of brand recognition needed to generate such value? Or does this feel less like a genuine attempt to use blockchain to enhance a consumer service, and more of a trend-hoping cash grab? 

Similarly, though personal finance applications certainly fall under the umbrella of consumer services, blockchain’s current iteration embodied by much of DeFi, does not. For every benefit it adds (anonymity and self-custody), it introduces double the complexity (specialized wallets, specialized tokens for gas and transaction fees, smart contract approval procedures, etc), all for some speculative gain.    

So Where Are We Now?

Blockchain technology has come a long way, from a single distributed ledger for anonymous P2P transactions to a sophisticated ecosystem of Turing-complete virtual machines with self-executing smart contracts and dedicated layers for scaling and abstraction. Yet, we haven’t made much progress in the consumer space. In fact, some estimates show that financial applications account for roughly 80% of all blockchain activity, while the rest is mostly distributed across enterprise and government solutions. 

To be clear, much of our current predicament is due to the fact that the criticisms we’ve raised for DeFi, also apply to all other Dapps. There is still a lot of work to be done in terms of improving user experience, enhancing interoperability, and matching or surpassing the ease of navigation offered by the Internet.

This is where Morph comes in.

On the technology front, our Responsive Validity Proofs, Decentralized Sequencers, Modular Architecture, and countless other innovations are taking us a step closer, every day, to the type of efficiency, security, and UI/UX needed to make our vision a reality. But beyond the complicated technology (which you sincerely shouldn’t be required to understand), it’s the vision presented in this article that truly differentiates us. 

There’s a reason why this is likely the first time you’re reading about the concept of “Consumer Blockchain”. Outside of a few specific applications that dip their toes into this realm, there simply hasn’t been a concerted effort to make this a reality.  

This is how Morph is Revolutionizing Consumer Blockchain! 

We’re unyielding and unrelenting in our pursuit of this goal. Whatever technological leap is required, we’ll continue working in the background to develop the infrastructure that enables it. At a more public and tangible level, we’re already manifesting our consumer-centric philosophy in how we present ourselves, the developers we choose to partner with, and the type of applications we’re fostering on our platform. Yet, we also understand that meaningful progress takes time, requiring gradual, iterative, and incremental steps. This is why we don’t outright deny the value of existing applications, closing off our platform to anything that doesn't fit the final vision of a consumer blockchain service. Morph will still feature a variety of services including DeFi and much more. These all have a role to play in attracting more users, builders, and resources to help us reach a transformative tipping point. 

Unlike the many other blockchains and protocols available today, we won’t be content patting ourselves on the back for creating some undecipherable technology that increases a random metric you don’t care about. Unless the technology translates into an application that brings some real-world utility into your life, it will never be enough. We won’t become complacent if some of our DeFi applications generate a lot of trading activity and revenue. Our goals extend far beyond profits. We simply won’t stop until we’ve created a consumer blockchain that hosts most, if not all, of the applications and services that make your life easier every day. 

Join us now!

If our vision sounds exciting or compelling, we invite you to join our consumer blockchain revolution!

We’ve prepared a program called the Morph Zoo. Season 1, The Genesis Jungle, is all about letting you explore our core tenet apps and partners that will eventually become the foundation of our mainnet. You’ll be rewarded for experimenting, having fun, and providing invaluable feedback that will contribute to our efforts to make consumer blockchain a reality.