The future of blockchain wallets - to be or not to be

The first article in the blockchain wallet series, the future of wallets: to be or not to be

By: wang chao, chief operating officer of Bitpie wallet

& have spent

The author foreword: elder brother, make so many years purse, earn money not? Whether bull or bear, users often asked. & have spent In fact, we mean: you can not withdraw ah, or my money how to do? I understand. So we repeat over and over again, the wallet's assets are the user's own custody, as long as the good copy mnemonic, the earth is not destroyed, money can not be lost.

& have spent

You can't make money, burn money first. Like most technology tools, wallets have a tough and tortuous road to revenue. 'money? Three words are the soul of every wallet team.

For a wallet, making money is not only a business problem, but also a security problem. A penniless team cannot make a consistent and adequate investment in security, and the industry is changing rapidly every day. Failing this, it will gradually die out, actively or passively. To be, or not to be, depends on it.

Basic functions of blockchain wallet

The basic function of blockchain wallet is to manage the private key and send and receive the encrypted assets. I can't think of a single software-only wallet for individuals that has ever charged for these basic features, not in the past, not now, and probably not for a long time to come. Download for free, send and receive for free (the miner's fee is not charged in the wallet), this is the basic expectation.So is this track destined to be a salt lake?

Of course not.

With the rapid development of the block chain world, the basic functions have long been unable to meet the needs of a part of users, and various expansion functions emerge at the right moment. The wallet's built-in accelerator is a typical scenario, and it's certainly familiar to friends who regularly send and receive bitcoin. There are many more such scenarios, such as bulk transfer, on-chain payment resources, resource leasing, and some features of the emerging smart contract wallet. An advanced feature that digs deep enough into users' pain points has a very good billing basis, as has been demonstrated in many scenarios.

However the user that needs this kind of advanced function everyday is a few after all, industry volume and participant are limited, even if had had very high market to occupy a rate, the income that this kind of function brings is not enough also. It's not realistic to live on this.

What else can a blockchain wallet do?

Addressing payment requirements can be seen as one of the origins of cryptographic assets, and this direction is naturally being pursued by a number of teams. In the past, there have been a lot of attempts in this field by overseas entrepreneurial teams. However, the income of such schemes mainly depends on the settlement platform facing merchants, which takes a certain percentage of the channel fee for each amount of funds received by merchants through the payment platform, and the proportion is not low. In such a payment scenario, it is difficult to charge the c-end wallet if it is only used as a terminal to complete a chain transfer. Some wallets chose visa  Master partners in issuing CARDS that can be used in the real business world. Working with businesses to issue such CARDS, wallets as part of the payment channel and OTC desk channels generates revenue. The lightning network, on the other hand, is a more decentralized payment scheme originating in the cryptographic community. In the lightning network ecosystem, if the wallet is a node itself, it can receive some fees by providing node services.

But neither scheme changes the fact that cryptographic assets are accepted as payment vehicles on a very small scale, and it is a bit harder to make money from them now. But with the rapid development of stable currency on the chain, payment scenarios are rapidly flooding with users, who are directly or indirectly bringing in revenue to the wallet, and the growth rate is staggering.

& have spent

The production of cryptographic assets (PoW mining) has been one of the few areas in the past decade that has consistently generated revenue, so a number of organisations have emerged in the upstream and downstream sectors of the sector, working together to share the pie. Unfortunately, the wallet is not one of them. However, as some of the influential PoS networks began to be put online, the production process successfully separated from real to virtual. For a time Staking the economy in full swing, everyone rushed, and in all the players, the wallet may be the most advantageous racetrack players. CoinMarketCap is likely to squeeze more and more PoS networks into the top 30 in the future. The total output of these networks can reach the level of tens of billions of dollars a year. Here, wallet can generate considerable revenue by participating in the nodes or rewinding the nodes, as well as by connecting the assets participating in Staking and extending services such as liquidity.

& have spent

The biggest chunk of revenue comes from inbound services. Open a 2016 wallet, open a 2020 wallet, and perhaps the most immediate change is the proliferation of services based on cryptographic assets. With the improvement of experience and the formation of user habits, both centralized and decentralized services are more and more accepted by users through the guidance of wallet. As a tool for users to manage their assets, such outreach services and wallets have a strong coupling effect. (open alipay and see how many things are under the wealth button)

& have spent

Open finance (DeFi) services, in particular, are growing rapidly and are bursting with great energy and innovation. With the maturity of the open financial network, a large number of asymmetry between the centralized services and decentralized services will be gradually wiped out, and the advantages of open finance such as security will be fully reflected. Cross-link technology is also rapidly evolving, and will soon open up the main links to form a huge parallel universe on the chain, while the various stability COINS and asset on the chain items will act as a wormhole to open up and down the chain of two parallel universes. A lot of assets and users will enter the chain through these wormholes, forming a financial world on the chain that will be infinitely larger than it is today.

& have spent

The wallet, the gateway to this parallel financial world, is the gateway to increasingly complex decentralized networks. From the rate of DeFi and cochain evolution, this day is actually very close.

& have spent

Finally, more coverage of DApp. Back in October 2018. At that time, the EOS main network has been online for 4 months, accumulated a certain number of users on the chain, then several excellent and representative experience of DApp attracted everyone's attention, successfully obtained a good traffic. And a lot of development teams figured out how to do DApp on EOS. For a time, hundreds of flowers bloom, wild growth, countless people exclaimed that the era of DApp is coming, this scene reached its peak in December. Unfortunately, it didn't last long. After the Spring Festival, the whole DApp circle died. The DApp on EOS perfectly interpreted the first half of Gartner technology maturity curve in four months.

The reason for the couch is complex, and there is not much analysis here. The spring of a few short months is a precious sample in the development history of DApp. Various types of DApp, DEX, neighborhood service teams, security teams, and even hackers have left a large footprint in this sample. As the entrance of DApp, wallet occupies the top position of this subdivision ecological chain. Not only has the user activity increased significantly, but all the business models that can be seen in the traditional Internet access, such as wallet as the application entrance, advertisement, hot spot and recommendation share, have appeared in a short time and are in short supply. This time has even become the moral underpinning of some wallet teams in a bear market - you see, there's money to be made in our business.

A year and a half later, the existing corporate chain is rapidly evolving, the new corporate chain team is also trying to explore, and the level of application developers on the corporate chain is also rapidly improving. I am confident that DApp will return in the near future.

One sentence sums up the various scenarios mentioned above - the beauty of the other shore is becoming clearer and closer.

We will all be the first generation of citizens of this new world. In this world, the wallet is a very special being, it connects the human chain, the carbon-based world and the silicon-based world. Wallets are not only used to manage everyone's cryptocurrency, but also include id CARDS, social security CARDS, voting rights, financial products, contracts, membership CARDS, props, lottery tickets, souvenir CARDS and much more that has not yet been created. As a container for identity on the chain, a large number of everyday behaviors are related to the blockchain wallet. And with all our imagination, we probably can't imagine what the wallet will actually evolve into and how important it will be in everyone's lives.

预告： 区块链钱包系列文章的第二篇  《钱包的未来 – 剧变将至》

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia