Virality is the holy grail which every idea and technology hopes to reach. The success or failure of a blockchain going viral depends on the efforts of innovators and early adopters who are first to discover the potential of these networks. These mavericks build and evangelize the technology with the aim of drawing a significant segment of the mainstream into their ecosystem. With free, instant transactions and a range of functional dApps live on the mainnet, EOS is well-poised to reach the next cohort of blockchain users. However, opening a new account on EOS involves paying RAM costs for the initial registration, creating unnecessary friction on the network. As EOS looks to achieve viral adoption, solutions that streamline the user onboarding process become critical to ensuring that user churn remains minimized.

Engineering Virality

The lifeblood of new technologies, and blockchain platforms in particular, is their ability to attract new users and multiply their network effects. One way to determine their success is by measuring the viral coefficient of their growth activities. A network’s ‘viral coefficient’ is the number of new users each current user is bringing in on average. Keeping this figure above one indicates that the number of new users organically absorbed into the network continues to grow on each iteration. Traditional business owners expend significant resources to optimize their viral coefficient. They conduct market analyses, run viral marketing campaigns and pay consultants to help them understand the psyche of their potential client base. Since crypto networks have no centralized entity coordinating these activities, the responsibility to recruit new users falls to a network’s existing users.

Seamless User Onboarding is Mission Critical

It is vital that the actual onboarding process for a product or network is as seamless as possible so that marketing expenditure is not wasted on churned users. Successful companies have been getting this right for some time now. For example, setting up a new Gmail account or Facebook Profile is as easy as choosing a password. Financial services companies, such as Revolut, similarly allow new users to sign up by selecting a passcode and entering in a few basic personal details.

An example of having to pay in order to create an EOS account. Website shown: https://eos-account-creator.com/

Onboarding on EOS — A Barrier to Entry

An EOS account is a human-readable string that represents the user’s assets on the blockchain. By default, it contains two sets of private and public keys, active keys and owner keys. The active keys allow the user to send funds, stake tokens and vote for block producers while the owner permissions include all of the above as well as changing the keys for the permissions. In order to set up this account, users must generate the two sets of keys and then pay the RAM costs associated with sending a registration transaction to the blockchain. RAM costs can either be paid by the user themselves through an account generator tool or by an existing account holder. Having to pay in order to set up an account is a major disincentive for potential new users, particularly low-income end-users who stand to gain the most from the inclusivity of blockchain-based services and applications.

Rolling Out the Red Carpet

Creating a simple and seamless onboarding experience is crucial in the quest to ingrain a new technology into the mainstream psyche. EOS is ripe for widespread adoption, yet the cost of creating a new account is deterring the masses. The efforts of early believers to grow the network are not as effective without a smooth onramp to bring new users aboard the EOS train.

The DAPP Network could potentially alleviate this issue, rolling out the red carpet for new EOS users. Stay tuned for more.

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