BSV is Ready for a New Type of Adoption

How breakthroughs in onboarding will facilitate products eclipsing evangelism as the primary method of driving BSV adoption

Up until now, BSV adoption has been driven by convincing people to become speculators. Whether through blog posts, podcasts, conferences, twitter spaces, or something else - a large portion of people involved in BSV were first brought into the space by being convinced someway or another that BSV was worth their time, attention, and capital. From being convinced, they became speculators - most commonly speculating with their capital by holding BSV, and with their time through building or evangelizing. 

This isn’t that different from the rest of the blockchain space, but the rest of the space has far more people, time, capital, and influence. This may end, but driving BSV adoption through the means of the past is slow and expensive. If it doesn’t change, then the “BSV has already won” attitude will end up being as foolish as it sounds to most today. Fortunately, BSV is ready for a new type of adoption.

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The HandCash fiat onramps were one of the most highly anticipated product features in the short history of BSV, but I’d argue that their importance is still underappreciated. In my view, these onramps represented the completion of the “minimum viable infrastructure” needed to drive BSV adoption through products instead of evangelism. 

For a product to drive adoption, a few things are needed - a great product, great onboarding, and great marketing/virality. Maybe some products could be so great, they could overcome poor onboarding or poor marketing/virality. But, I think it is much more likely that BSV’s killer app will come from an app which makes incremental progress with each of these categories until the dam breaks and a formula for bringing in users is discovered and continually utilized.

Since Genesis, HandCash has done more than any other company at facilitating a great product with great onboarding. The HandCash connect API makes building a product which uses BSV payments much easier and cheaper. Their split-key architecture makes creating an account in the browser much simpler and more familiar. All it takes is an email and phone number, rather than having to write down a seed phrase and getting warned about losing all of your money and NFTs if you don’t. And, of course, there are the fiat onramps - being able to get as little of $5 BSV with a credit card in the wallet. This is a dramatic improvement over the status quo which often involved multiple exchanges, significant waiting time, and required purchases much higher than $5. 

There are still a lot of steps between having no BSV wallet and having a HandCash account with BSV in it - too many for most users if they are required up front. But, each of these steps is easy enough that they can be woven into a successful onboarding experience. In the case of Duro Dogs, an NFT digital pet game created by my comapny, NFTY Jigs, this may involve getting your first NFT pet dog before ever signing up for HandCash, something we are working on now. Sign-up could occur later in the process in order to access desired features. Once a user has sufficient desire to access paid features, they can pull out their credit card, or possibly even earn their first BSV through their play, something already happening regularly in Duro Dogs.

This type of onboarding is extremely familiar compared to successful apps today such that the unique value propositions of apps like Duro Dogs could be enough to get users over the hump. Of course, a great product and marketing is still necessary. It won’t happen overnight, but these advancements in onboarding from HandCash make the alignment of great product, onboarding, and marketing/virality possible. We want Duro Dogs to be that killer app, but there are many candidates like Haste Arcade, PowChess, or even Twetch, which recently integrated the HandCash fiat ramps. 

If you want to see BSV adoption happen more quickly, keep using, sharing, and contributing to the products taking adoption seriously. To stay in the loop on all things BSV adoption, subscribe to this substack.

Next time: What type of adoption matters?