Next bull market driver: Overview of mainstreaming Web3 Consumer Application consumer applications

In this article, a comprehensive overview of the mainstream normalization of current Web3 consumer applications is provided, along with exploring their respective opportunities and challenges. (Background: Will the U.S. Department of Justice's insistence on Google splitting up and selling Chrome browsers affect the Web3 ecosystem?) (Background: How to reconstruct the traditional telecommunications industry with Block chain and Web3?) Recently, the market sentiment has been relatively low, as the potential policy dividends are gradually realized below expectations, and a series of celebrity Memecoin such as Trump have harvested the Liquidity of the Crypto speculative market, the two-year trend driven by macroscopic bullishness of Liquidity seems to be coming to an end. In response, more and more investors and believers have started to think about the next value narrative of the Web3 industry, with the Web3 consumer application track becoming a focus of discussion. Only with the existence of more consumer-level applications for Mass Adoption will this overbuilt ecosystem truly bring user adoption and sustainable commercial value. Therefore, the author has been thinking about Web3 consumer applications during this time. Some insights are shared here, hoping to discuss with you. In this article, a comprehensive overview of the mainstream normalization of current Web3 consumer applications is provided, along with exploring their respective opportunities and challenges. In future articles, the author will continue to share some specific market insights and ideas, and welcome discussions with friends. What is a Web3 Consumer Application The so-called Consumer Application, in the Chinese context, refers to To C applications, meaning that your target users are mostly ordinary consumers, not enterprise users. Open your App Store, and all the applications inside belong to this category. Web3 Consumer Applications refer to software applications targeting consumers with Web3 features. Typically, according to the categorization in most App Stores, we can roughly divide the entire Consumer Application track into the following 10 categories, each of which will have different subdivisions. Of course, as the market matures, many new products will combine multiple features to find their own differentiators to some extent, but we can still make simple classifications based on their core selling points. Current mainstream normalization of Web3 Consumer Applications and their respective opportunities and challenges As of now, I believe there are three common normalizations of Web3 Consumer Applications: 1. Optimizing certain problems in traditional Consumer Applications using the technical characteristics of Web3 infrastructure: This is a more common normalization. We know that a large amount of investment in the Web3 industry revolves around infrastructure construction, and the creators adopting this normalization hope to use the technical features of Web3 infrastructure to enhance their product's competitive advantage or provide new services. Usually, the benefits brought by these technological innovations can be categorized into the following two types: Extreme privacy protection and data sovereignty: Opportunity: Privacy has always been the main theme of innovation in Web3 infrastructure. From the initial asymmetric encryption algorithms for identity verification, to the integration of many software and hardware technologies such as ZK, FHE, and TEE, the tech giants in Web3 seem to adhere to extreme cynicism, aiming to establish a network environment that does not rely on third-party trust and provides users with the ability to interact with information or value. The most direct benefit of these technological features is providing users with data sovereignty, where personal privacy information can be directly hosted on trusted local hardware devices, avoiding data leaks. Many Web3 Consumer Applications optimized for this technological feature exist, and any project branding itself as Decentralization XX belongs to this normalization, such as Decentralization social media platforms, Decentralization AI models, Decentralization video websites, and so on. Challenge: After years of market validation, it can be said that there has not been a significant advantage observed in the market competition by using privacy as a core selling point. There are two reasons for this: firstly, the importance consumers place on privacy is based on large-scale privacy breaches and infringements. However, in most cases, such issues can be effectively mitigated through more comprehensive legislation, so if privacy protection is based on a more complex product experience or higher usage costs, its competitiveness will be significantly lacking. Secondly, the business models of most current consumer applications are built on the value extracted from big data, such as precision marketing. Overemphasizing privacy protection may undermine mainstream business models because user data will be dispersed among a batch of data islands, making it difficult to design sustainable business models. If the product ultimately has to rely on so-called 'Tokenomics,' unnecessary speculative attributes must be introduced to the product, which not only disperses the team's resources and focus on dealing with the impact of these attributes on the product but also hinders finding PMF, as will be specifically analyzed later. Low-cost global 24/7 trusted execution environment: Opportunity: The emergence of numerous L1 and L2 solutions provides developers with a new, global, 24/7 trusted execution environment. Typically, traditional software service providers independently maintain their programs, such as running on their server clusters or in the cloud. This naturally brings trust costs in longer collaborations, especially when the strengths or scales of the longers are balanced, or when sensitive and crucial data is involved, and these trust costs usually translate into significant development costs and user usage costs, such as in cross-border payments scenarios. The execution environment brought by Web3 can effectively drop related costs for services of this kind. Stable Coin is a good example of such applications. Challenge: From the perspective of reducing costs and increasing efficiency, this is indeed a competitive advantage, but it is relatively difficult to explore application scenarios. As mentioned above, benefits are only realized in services involving longer collaborations, with relevant entities being independent, scales being balanced, and sensitive data being involved. This is a rather stringent condition. Currently, most of these application scenarios are concentrated in the Financial Service field. 2. Designing new market marketing strategies, user loyalty programs, or business models using encryption assets: Similar to the first point, developers adopting this normalization also aim to introduce Web3 attributes to add competitive advantages to their products in a relatively mature, market-validated scenario. However, these application developers focus more on introducing encryption assets and leveraging the high financial attributes of encryption assets to design better marketing strategies, user loyalty programs, and business models. We know that any investment target has two kinds of value: commodity attributes and financial attributes. The former is related to the use value of the target in a specific scenario, such as the habitability attributes of real estate assets, while the latter is related to its value in the financial market...