What the Browser Wars can teach us about the coming Wallet Wars 🦊 🌈 🐕 ⚖️
The battle between Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox & Safari has been a huge win for people using the Internet. The battle for the interchain browser is about to begin ⚔️
Today, crypto is a casino. The number one use case is speculation. Around 300 million people hold some of form of crypto on exchanges or in wallets. They do so for one reason: to try and make money. This is an important but boring use case that can be taken care of by trading nerds with no taste.
My best guess is that we have around 3-5 million truly active crypto users.
If you ever get to look at the analytics packages of some of the top dapps today, you will be shocked at how few people are interacting with them. So we have:
📈 300-500m crypto speculators, holders, traders, arbitrageurs, borrowers & investors
🧬 3-5m crypto creators, users, patrons, supporters, voters, organisers & users
Why is this? I think it is because mobile wallets are terribly designed dumpster fires.
🗡 The Browser Wars 🗡
Marc Andreessen vs. Bill Gates. Google vs. Microsoft. Safari vs. Everyone
When I was a teenager a read a book called Dot.Con. It detailed the gory reality of the dot-com bubble and captured the incredible amount of capital, creativity, and collective mania that occurred in the Bay Area.
If you prefer quick documentaries to lengthy books, I recommend watching this:
This documents the browser wars before Google got in the ring. Microsoft used its operating system to destroy Netscape Navigator. Google used its search engine to destroy Internet Explorer.
Today, the new battleground for browsers is Privacy. People are creeped out when they see ads for things they spoke about with friends. They find the incessant ad tracking invasive and irksome.
In my opinion, there is only one browser that has sensible incentives: Safari. Everyone else is either drinking from the trough of money Google gives them, running a $BAT-shit crazy token, or trying to sell to enterprises.
Safari has one goal: Make iPhone better.
Apple are not trying to sell you. They are trying to sell to you.
Tim Cook is a deeply private man who took decades to come out as gay. The commitment to privacy comes from the top. He grew up in Alabama and had to hide his feelings from everyone. Steve was one of the first people to figure out where his heart was. He made him feel comfortable with his sexuality.
This is one of the many reasons I trust the teams at Apple. They are all fighting for the people they sell products to. They do not want the protocols we use to conduct our daily lives to spy on us.
It is a beautiful mission that is starting to resonate with people very deeply in the US:
If we expand our aperture from the crucible of American culture, we can see that Safari is doing fantastically well, capturing around 1/3 of mobile usage:
What these graphs clearly show is that Apple is a big player in the browser wars. The Ethereum community has ignored Safari too long. The Safari Wallet community is going to change that forever.
🧩 Extension Tension 🧩
Chrome focused on developers by allowing them to extend the browser easily
The team at Google realised that they needed a way to make Chrome more accessible to developers. This lead to the creation of Chrome Extensions:
Browser extensions are able to modify Google Chrome. They are supported by the browser's desktop edition. These extensions are written using web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. They are distributed through Chrome Web Store.
On September 9, 2009, Google enabled extensions by default on Chrome's developer channel, and provided several sample extensions for testing.It was launched on January 25, 2010, along with Google Chrome 4.0, containing approximately 1500 extensions.
Apple followed suit a few months later with Safari 5, which had Extensions:
Chrome won this battle hands-down. The Chrome Store dominated the browser extension market and put Safari at a huge disadvantage for a decade.
Apple laid down the gauntlet on mobile Safari in 2021:
When I connected to 1Password’s iOS 15 Safari Extension I went into a hypomanic state. I pinged every wallet creator I knew and asked them: where is your extension?
They were bemused. I was incredulous. There are 100+ Ethereum wallets for iOS—how did every single one of them miss this huge opportunity?
The answer is simple: they are too rich, too distracted, too arrogant and too tired.
A lot of the top wallet creators are going through complicated divorces, buying tracts of land in foreign countries, fighting with their corporate owners, postulating on Twitter about the future, or sipping fine wines in their second homes.
The Ethereum Wallet community has been asleep at the wheel.
💠 Who Will Win The Wallet Wars? 💠
We are about to see an epic showdown between a few teams. Which strategy will win?
The battle for the best mobile wallet in Ethereum is just getting started. Building a Safari Extension is not hard—anyone can do it. What will really matter is the strategy you use to attract customers and developers.
I have a bunch of theories about how this will play out. I think it comes down to:
👩💻 Open Source Interfaces - It is INSANE that Metamask has a restrictive license on developers who want to fork it. We funded it as a community. We should have access to the code. We should be free to fork it if we see fit.
📲 Mobile First - Very few real people haven a desktop or laptop any more. That is a privilege enjoyed by knowledge works, technological nerds, and the wealthiest people in the world. A lot more people can afford iPhone because of the subscription financing arrangements that are become accessible across the world.
🍏 Native Code - Every mobile wallet should go with the grain of the platform it seeks to dominate. The Safari Wallet community is laser focused on writing clean Swift code that makes the most out of Apple’s platform.
🤑 DAO Funded - Wallets today are all run with private companies and shady investors. That is bonkers. We should fund Ethereum wallet development using the technology we have build to manage capital.
🌱 Seed Recovery - There has been zero innovation in seed recovery ideas in the last 2 years. Smart contract wallets are an expensive disaster that don’t work for regular people. We have to try lots of new ideas in this area to help people feel safe.
🖼 Cultural Care - The biggest onboarding mechanism for Ethereum in the last year has been the culture. It is being created all over the world and being expressed using NFTs. We have to take good care of this community who are general ingenious but not engineering-minded.
♥️ Thoughtful Design - If you take any mobile wallet, hand it to your non-Etherean friend, and watch them try to get started, they lose their minds in minutes. It is so hostile because it was designed for Ethereum developers, not normal people.
🔖 Developer Documentation - Catering to developers is how to get customers. When you make product that developers are desperate to use, they come up with innovative ways to get customers for their products. A great wallet developer must be the friend of every great dapp developer in the world.
🥷🏿 Want to join the Wallet Wars? 🥷🏼
We are assembling a crew of incredible people who care deeply about creating something great
If you are passionate about engineering, designing, organising or testing, we need you.
Please consider joining us at: discord.gg/safari-wallet
Testing
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Have a great Monday peeps 👀