Can Blockchain Applications Become Popular?
Since the birth of the first Bitcoin block in 2009, over 15 years have passed, and the most popular blockchain applications are still highly concentrated in the financial services sector. They have had difficulty penetrating developed countries and have faced heavy regulation from governments around the world. We often hear the question: when will blockchain applications achieve mass adoption?
GameFi is one of the few blockchain application fields that has gained widespread attention, such as Axie Infinity, a game that allows players to earn money, or STEPN, an app that allows users to earn money by walking. These applications have become trends. However, due to the influence of financial market cycles or the presence of short-term arbitrageurs, these blockchain applications have struggled to sustain steady growth. They often experience a price crash after a surge in popularity and fade away.
From the perspective of traditional application development, the key factors for sustainable growth are the positioning and value of the product itself, the level of refinement in its design, the balance of various mechanisms, and continuous positive feedback from the user community. Many current blockchain applications overly focus on marketing and early coin profits, similar to the early days of Web 1.0 when many internet companies went public before achieving stable revenue, ultimately leading to the dot-com bubble. The surviving companies that became dominant players in today’s information industry are built on effective financial discipline and continuous development of excellent products.
Therefore, let’s take a look at the products themselves to see whether the thoughts of the designers and operators behind them are sufficient to support sustainable growth.
What are the features of the Fooday app, a food community?
Fooday is a food community app developed by a Taiwanese team. Recognizing the prevalence of fake reviews on the internet, Fooday aims to create a platform for “authentic reviews.” How does it achieve this?
Firstly, Fooday provides incentives for users to earn rewards by writing restaurant reviews in the form of the cryptocurrency $FOOD.
Reviews must be taken using Fooday’s built-in camera to ensure that they are taken at the restaurant’s location and to verify that the reviewer has actually visited the place.
To write reviews or withdraw funds, users must first purchase the Foodca camera, which is currently priced at a minimum of 65 FUSD (equivalent to 75 USD or approximately 2,400 New Taiwan dollars) on the market. Users can only write one review approximately every 16 hours, thus raising the barrier for fake reviews or short-term arbitrage.
It is worth mentioning that the user experience of the Fooday app is quite good. For example, in the review writing interface, the app automatically provides the map location of the restaurant’s address, and when selecting photos, it prioritizes showing photos from nearby establishments. These details demonstrate that the team indeed values product experience. The Fooday team members have previous experience working on the inline restaurant reservation system, which has contributed to their success.
Fooday explores new approaches to community management. Unlike the centralized approach of reporting on traditional Web 2.0 platforms, Fooday allows community members to serve as “anonymous whistleblowers” by initiating “challenges” to remove low-quality reviews. The platform randomly selects community members to vote, enhancing the autonomy of the web3 community’s values.
The continuous iterative improvement of the product makes it difficult to integrate blockchain technology. Currently, Fooday only allows rewards to be withdrawn to the Polygon blockchain, and the Foodca camera has not yet become an on-chain NFT. We also hope that the governance mechanism of the community can gradually transition to on-chain to align with the values of blockchain data permanence and immutability.
Blockchain applications still face competition from existing applications. For example, Fooday’s entry barriers inhibit the scalability of user growth. The requirement to use the app’s built-in camera for location verification makes it difficult for food bloggers who use standalone cameras to join. The map exploration interface is similar to Google Maps, but the total number of reviews is still relatively low. These competitive factors are unrelated to blockchain technology but are challenges that any application product must face to achieve widespread growth.
Apple’s late co-founder, Steve Jobs, emphasized at the 1997 WWDC conference that we should build products and technologies based on user experience, rather than shaping the product based on new technologies. This statement remains highly relevant today.