Let’s Not Marginalize Consumers Anymore — How Morph Builds For Users
The title says it all. With blockchain’s dismal adoption rates and its stubborn insistence on churning out unintuitive, inaccessible applications, the future looks bleak. But before we expand on the many challenges we face, it’s helpful to understand what exactly we’re failing at.
The Promise of Web 3
Web1 or the early Internet enabled simple information exchange. Web2 gave us a burst of functionality led by e-commerce and social media giants, but these corporations took full control over our data.
Web3 is the next evolution, promising a decentralized, censorship-resistant, and privacy-focused Internet that returns data sovereignty to the user. Have we achieved this?
Nothing for Consumers
Sadly, Web3 remains a distant dream. The building blocks to materialize this dream already exist, but they’re not being utilized effectively. The most successful on-chain applications we’ve built so far are in the realm of DeFi. Ask any regular Web2 user to interact with any decentralized exchange and it becomes painfully obvious just how unintuitive and niche these applications are. Trading volumes and TVL metrics may sound impressive, but they’re incredibly misleading. The reality is that we do not have enough consumers using blockchain applications. Why? Well, we’re simply not building enough applications aimed at consumers. Instead, we have complicated specialized services, developer-oriented infrastructure, and sparse consumer-facing projects that never gain any traction. If we keep heading down this path, we risk becoming an ecosystem of mostly desolate chains with applications offering limited utility to an incredibly narrow user base.
The Consumer Layer
At Morph, we’ve made it our mission to solve this consumer adoption crisis. Though we offer an Ethereum layer 2 blockchain as part of our core technology, In aggregate, our offerings amount to much more than that. We’re a Global Consumer Layer, acting as the distribution hub for the resources builders need to launch and scale for the mass market. Let’s break this down. From a technological perspective, our layer 2 offers the type of cutting-edge technology talented builders need to make intuitive and performant consumer applications that can match those of Web2. However, we take this a step further with a variety of builder programs such as incubators, hackathons, and a tailored Entrepreneur-in-Residence program, all offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, mentorship, and technical support. This is how we inspire and train talented developers to focus on the consumer problem in the first place.
Of course, even the most well-designed consumer applications cannot succeed without users. Morph also steps in to help solve this visibility challenge. We’ve created a Centralized Exchange (CEX) Coalition comprised of the exchanges ready to list the most promising consumer application tokens on Morph. This is a win-win situation as projects get recognition and users through these listings, while the exchanges are able to offer a curated selection of exciting consumer-oriented projects to their users. This coalition is complemented by exclusive Moprh marketing support initiatives along with an Ambassador program that boasts around 100,000 members. Additionally, we’ve also created a VC Alliance to offer our projects a direct path to top investors, and many other funds and grants to help with every stage of development.
It’s these and a collection of many other programs and services that have helped us evolve from a mere Layer 2 into a full-fledged Consumer Layer that tackles the adoption crisis with a unique holistic approach.