Square cofounder Jack Dorsey said a hackathon that allowed him to use bitcoin (BTC) to buy the proverbial cup of coffee inspired the user experience of the company’s peer-to-peer Cash App.

“We wanted to make money as simple as sending an email,” Dorsey said of the principle driving the consumer-focused app during the Consensus 2018 conference in New York on Wednesday.

At the same time, understanding consumer preferences is a two-way street. Seeing users trying to buy and sell bitcoin using Square’s technology was what led it to become the first public company to enable the buying and selling of crypto, according to Dorsey.

Users “showed their intent,” he said. “We took that as a lead, wanting to learn deeply and increase our appetite for risk.”

To be sure, consumers are increasingly interested in the world of cryptocurrency, if only because of the mainstream media coverage of its meteoric rise. In 2014, fewer than two percent of eToro’s social trading network users traded bitcoin, but today 80 percent do, said founder and CEO Yoni Assia. “All our communities are fascinated and inspired by cryptocurrencies.”

At the same time, that doesn’t mean consumers will eagerly jump on the decentralized app (DApp) bandwagon if the user experience isn’t equal to what consumer apps already provide.

“There will be an ‘iPhone moment’ for DApps where it’s drop-dead simple and we can consume [them] in almost the same way as regular applications,” Wilson said.

“One of the hardest lessons for consumer software to learn is that your product is not important to your users,” said Dieter Shirley, cofounder of the oft-mocked — but financially lucrative — CryptoKitties. “As soon as we expose consumers to [the underlying technology], we lose them.”

From Mainstream to Blockchain

Still, a number of successful consumer-focused companies are taking mainstream apps and moving them to the blockchain. Messaging service Kik’s founder Ted Livingston described his company’s decision to do so as a way to avoid being “copied and crushed” by competitors like Facebook.

In similar fashion, crowdfunding site Indiegogo’s founder Slava Rubin predicted that all crowdfunding transactions will move to the blockchain. “It’s where the puck is going,” he said.

A growing number of decentralized apps are gaining traction, including Graphite, an alternative to Google docs that tracks the performance of business websites and applications, among other services; Stealthy, a fully decentralized secure messaging app; and a number of decentralized cloud storage solutions that scatter users’ files throughout the blockchain.