(Amazon) Prime time in web3

There are a few elements of Prime that are very important and I believe transferable to web3 consumer applications:

“The market cap of the protocol always grows faster than the combined value of the applications built on top, since the success of the application layer drives further speculation at the protocol layer. And again, increasing value at the protocol layer attracts and incentivises competition at the application layer.”

Prime membership simultaneously drives adoption and usage of transactional products (eg buying TVs on Amazon) as well as other subscription products (eg Prime Video) and infrastructure/protocols (eg Amazon warehousing)Because Prime’s main purpose is to drive behavior on other services rather than revenue on its own, Amazon can ensure the benefits d... See more

Aggregation, acquisitions, and partnerships will happen at the product layer as much or more than in web2, even given an interoperable and composable landscape. People will want fewer rather than more Prime-like memberships, so established organizations with already successful products will have an edge on building or partnering with complementary ... See more

Most of the widely adopted products right now are extremely transactional - apps that help you exchange tokens for example. As Jesse Walden correctly points out, these products should commoditize their applications in order to drive more demand for their truly differentiated product, the underlying exchange.

There are over 200 million prime members worldwide, generating north of $25 billion in revenue. The real story isn’t the revenue from Prime though; it’s what Prime does for the rest of Amazon’s product. Recent studies showed that Prime members spend roughly $2K on Amazon a year, 4X more than non-Prime members. There’s no way to prove causality give... See more

So the meta point here is that if web3 really is the future, I believe it will look remarkably less transactional than it is right now. We will need applications built on crypto rails to connect with friends, find restaurants, share photos, and so on. Those products will still feed the protocols underneath them, but they will also be expensive to b... See more

As consumers, our most valuable affinities will be to brands and communities, not specific products. 

Those memberships will feel like Prime, where more and more of the products and services you need live under one umbrella. This will help make the UX of web3 feel less scattered.