Tackling the adoption issue — One DApp at a time

Cryptostaw : A peer to peer payments application leveraging decentralized components. Bringing together Utility + Scalability + User & business friendly features

We should be able to use cryptocurrencies to make payments — and why not? They are permission-less and can be sent to anyone who has an address (basically an internet connection) without any third party interference. This cryptographic address, used for making payments is easy to obtain unlike bank accounts and will hugely empower the populace that has been deprived of legacy banking. Despite the advantages of this system there are some drawbacks that hinder its adoption. Before delving into Cryptostaw let’s first discuss the issues that the stakeholders on the business end of Dapps face today.

Let’s divide the stakeholders into two categories :

Users who interact with Dapps

Businesses looking to adopt crypto as a means of payment for their goods/services

There are other stakeholders on the development side but to restrict the scope of the article we focus on the two mentioned above.

Users:

People need practical use cases to adopt crypto into their daily lives. People don’t’ want to nurture virtual kitties daily, at least not the average Joe and for sure not right now!

Thinking about it, what is it that they want then? Payment is the first use case that comes to mind.

Let’s list some transactions an average person performs daily:

- Buy a coffee/meal

- Pay for a ticket

- Settle debts via on app payments

Nothing fancy right! Just the run of the mill, simple day to day stuff.

But!

Yeah that’s right there has to be a but here, can they do it today using a non-censurable medium? and while using a cryptocurrency?

Can it be done without long wait times, without paying huge amounts in fees?

The answer is, well at least right now, a resounding NO!

There are no apps that allow users to split bills, or make a small payment to their peers or buy the now mythical ‘coffee’ over the counter via crypto!

Businesses:

People run business to make profits. Period.

They can’t risk the money they make, by risk think about a 20% drop in value when they wake up the next day and see markets tanking. Or for that matter even a 2% drop, some business would get wiped out by that kind of volatility eating into their margins.

Thus, for any business to even begin to contemplate using a cryptocurrency there needs to be a guarantee that a $20 worth of crypto today will be worth $20 in the days to come as well. This is a basic requirement that we think needs to be in place before we see any meaningful adoption by businesses offering crypto payments.

Well it’s kind of an chicken and egg problem . Sellers, but no Buyers and on the flip side buyers but no sellers. To resolve this we need to address both sides of the issue. We are not even starting to cover the UX part of the problem but let’s just focus our attention on utility for now.