The Next Bitcoin Adoption Wave

Stacking Sats and the Gamification of Earning BTC

JP Morgan’s blockchain innovation team investigating Bitcoin

As the tide of Bitcoin’s price retreats to its lowest point in this cycle, there is a tsunami of new products and memes coming out that have lured me back into getting more Bitcoin, and I think they hooked me on an element of BTC that other products have mostly cast away — the gamification of earning/buying Bitcoin for the average person, or put simply, making diving into Bitcoin “fun” despite possibly being under water with the price. I don’t usually talk about products in my ARticles, but instead of bottling up these thoughts, I’m going to breach the subject of two recently shipped pearls that have compelled me to resume my treasure hunt for more satoshis (1/100 million of a BTC, aka “sats”): CashApp and Lolli. No more puns, I promise. Don’t be salty.

Why These Products Specifically?

CashApp and Lolli are two products that are coming to Bitcoin from the legacy system. Square already had a successful, functional product before they found a way to incorporate Bitcoin, and Lolli is introducing users to Bitcoin for completing purchases with a workflow that feels completely normal (dare I say, boring!?) to your average online shopper. The collision of common, legacy finance workflows with the introduction of BTC demolishes the friction that may have previously prevented people from signing up for a “Bitcoin” product. The next wave is going to be driven by introducing people to Bitcoin through workflows or products that the common person is already using.

#StackingSats with the CashApp

Jack’s no hack! He stacks sats by the rack

The #StackingSats meme is a fun, weekly event where people buy small amounts of BTC and then tweet about it. I believe the meme originated from the great minds behind the Tales from the Crypt podcast, and it involves the CashApp in particular. I think there are a few reasons for this meme growing around the CashApp and why it has continued for about a month.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square’s CEO, has demonstrated a clear understanding of why Bitcoin is important, and CashApp is a simple, yet effective representation of that understanding. You can use it to send and receive USD, as a debit account with a personalized VISA debit card, and you can buy/sell and withdraw Bitcoin in under 5 minutes. They have pushed the legacy financial system to the limit and are cautiously supporting the thing that they know can disrupt legacy finance, Bitcoin. It’s a simple and beautiful product that is immediately useful for every day purchases and is also positioned to disrupt itself if/when the time comes. It added Bitcoin functionality to a sleek product that already works great for your average person.

The Gamification of #StackingSats with Lolli

The elusive double sat stack. The .0037 BTC from Lolli is worth ~$75 at BTC’s ATH price of $20,000

Lolli is a deliciously sneaky product designed to introduce Bitcoin to newcomers in a nearly zero-risk fashion. Install a chrome extension, forget about it, and then just randomly earn BTC for shopping online. Lolli will alert you with a small pop-up in the upper right hand corner of your browser when you stumble onto a vendor’s site that supports it. Yes, I want to earn 5% of my purchase in Bitcoin for buying the thing I already planned on purchasing.

Alex Adelman, the CEO of Lolli, had some interesting viewpoints on the Stephan Livera Podcast that I think will resonate with a lot of people. We need attractive ways to introduce BTC to the vast majority of people in the world who have likely heard about BTC but still haven’t tried it. Incorporating BTC into a workflow that they were planning to complete anyways is a brilliant, frictionless way to on-board newcomers. Bitcoin is like a rewards program that allows you to buy street food in Thailand, socks in Amsterdam, and the plane tickets to get you there. It’s a rewards program for the whole world that nobody can control and is worth exactly market price at any given moment. Lolli triggers something inside of you that makes you want to find the best deal to stack more sats. It’s fun.

But the best part is that Lolli is sneakily growth-hacking Bitcoin adoption at the same time. By turning BTC into a shopping rewards experience, they are able to even further capitalize on Bitcoin’s ability to hack the human psyche. Since installing it, I’ve already adjusted my spending habits to check the merchants that support Lolli in order to stack them sats, because why wouldn’t I want to earn a scarce global resource for making a normal purchase?

Future Gamification Opportunities

#LNTrustChain gamifying Lightning Network adoption

There’s a good chance that the CME Bitcoin futures volume, Fidelity Digital Assets announcing their soft go-live, or even the fact that a lightning transaction was sent from a country where Bitcoin is banned to a country with a collapsing currency aren’t going to thrill your neighbor who works in middle management, but there’s a chance that they would be interested in earning Bitcoin as a reward for shopping online at Best Buy, or as a seamless, new version of a savings account that is already included in their favorite finance app. We need to be thinking about new ways to introduce Bitcoin to existing products/workflows in a fun, low risk, low effort way. There are already promising signs on the horizon with the instantaneous transactions enabled by lightning network, and the #StackingSats meme is demonstrating some traction.

Products that make getting BTC more fun with minimal risk will usher in the next adoption wave, and the bottom of the bear market is the right time to be thinking through new ways to nudge people into trying it out. Bitcoin is a global competition, and it’ll be way better for you if your community has some before it succeeds rather then watching people around you scramble to get BTC while it’s devaluing your local currency. Fun!

It will take you under 5 minutes to set up both of these products. Why not try them?