(Amazon) Prime time in web3

People will want fewer memberships than more. Whether by acquisition, merger, or partnership, a few major membership tokens will emerge.

There are two main differences to call out in how Prime type memberships might work in web3. First is that rather than simply having members, we have owners. Many DAOs such as Friends With Benefits are already operating in this way - holding a certain amount of token grants you access to the suite of products and services that the DAO offers. Early... See more

To rewind a bit, the reason the topic of how consumer applications build businesses is up for debate is because value in crypto has primarily been captured so far on the protocol layer, essentially in transactions that happen behind the scenes of the apps we use.

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

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.

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

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

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 build and only possible if they can capture significant value on the application layer.Enter membership moats.

My other issue with being too protocol focused is that if we can’t capture much value on the application layer, it will simply lead to shitty apps. As anyone who has tried to figure out how to navigate the world of web3 knows, we need to strive for vastly better and easier to use consumer applications than we have right now.

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.