There has been quite a bit of discussion about wallets and UI/UX on the forum, but if you like Fearless, you might want to check out Nova (also mobile), and Talisman and Subwallet (desktop)…
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I believe that Nodle is addressing a critical problem and I wholeheartedly support any initiatives aimed at making Web3 more accessible to everyday users. Keep up the great work, and I look forward to seeing the progress you make in bridging the gap between the crypto and real-world ecosystems.
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If you look beyond Polkadot, you can find some pretty awesome RealFi solutions:
It would be awesome to have something like Celo become a Parachain. That could create a surge of L2 world-changing dApps. They could all partner with one another and they would be quick to set up shop without having to jump through the hoops of building your own L1.
In my opinion, the greater the fluidity in UX, the better result in terms of adoption.
One answer quoted that the user in general like to watch short videos and messengers. It’s true.
So in real-world applications, it’s impossible to not think in the social media trend.
Users being rewarded based on their geo-location, by watching ads or doing tasks, sounds great.
But not rewarded in something difficult to be valued. To be used. Difficult even to explain.
So I think it would be a game changer to explore rewards integrated with the real world.
But we are close here. You have a great product.
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The Nodle app does a good job at onboarding new users in a frictionless manner - No upfront prompt pushing users to write down/verify seed phrases, but instead reminds them to do so.
The first one out of the gate I would build, is be a system that all businesses could use by creating visitor perks - it could be a complementary cup of coffee, or a bottle of water, or 5% off selected products, etc. This would create a incentive to drive more visitor volume and create a win/win. They don’t necessarily need to be rewarded with crypto unless the business decides to.
It could happen by programming a smart mission (embedded NFT) to where the business determines the complementary item, then has a smartphone sitting at their counter (or just a QR code) so the Nodle app user could scan (or airdrop based on metadata range requirements) which activates the smart mission to facilitate the “reward”.
Another real-world example would be to get Ski Resorts to use the Nodle app as a virtual lift ticket and by-pass lift ticket lines which was a major hurtle I observed when I was Sierra-at-Tahoe’s webmaster during my 12 years living at Lake Tahoe - The lift lines were always a major downside to visitors which caused huge bottle necks in foot traffic, not to mention that people spent hours traveling there to ski/snow board vs. stand in a line. The smart mission could be programmed so the Nodle app user could use their phone as the lift ticket while the ticket checker has a Bluetooth beacon located near them to activate the smart missions criteria.
This “system” could also be used for amusement based companies like Disney Land, etc.
Also, Smart Missions could be used for Real Estate agents as an additional service - incorporated into their listings somehow by creating NFT brochures for prospective buyers which also provides visitor analytics back to the agent, etc.
I believe there are numerous use-case implementations utilizing Nodle’s world-wide infrastructure, and have other use-case ideas but only have so much time in the day to create 
Huge props to all the hard work it took to get this far! and I look forward to watching Nodle’s world-wide impact grow!
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We do (need more real-world applications). I’m a big fan of the Nodle products and offerings. Thanks for sharing the paper too.
I certainly don’t think we’re lacking the technology. Rather, I think we’re lacking educational material for building on top of the numerous protocols that make up our ecosystem. I really enjoyed the Examples section from the Smart Missions paper (page 19). @eliott does Nodle have any tutorials or workshops to help developers build similar POCs for educational purposes?
I think that the next big phase for driving innovation towards real-world use cases is to provide tutorials that can equip any developer coming into our ecosystem with how they would go about building on top of protocols like Nodle. But these need to have easy-to-grasp narratives, just like in your examples. And one thing that’s unique about our ecosystem is the prospects of collaborating on these types of demos (see previous post on this - maybe you have ideas to add there:) ).
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That’s a good point. In regards to Nodle, we will of course have POCs and documentation in place once the smart missions are available on the chain. We hope to have some more details in the next few months.
I agree. As an ecosystem, we have to figure out ways our various protocols can collaborate if there are any synergies. I will drop a few notes in the thread.
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What I think is more crucial than designing “real world” use cases for Web3 tech is articulating clearly the problems inherent in the Web2 status quo model. You all know the issues well. At the forefront of my mind are data sovereignty, privacy, security, interoperability, and value-creation models (“you are the product”). We know these things, but that’s because we can see the machinations on a code, theoretical, or political level. What has driven so much adoption thus far in Web3 is economic speculation. I think those of us reading these posts need to come to terms with that. Speculation has meant a lot of things for this space. At the end of the day, one result has been proving that yes, DApps and the technologies that facilitate them can indeed address those problems I mentioned earlier.
So yes, of course I agree that we need “real-world” applications. Here are some of my thoughts on what comes next.
A focus on education. Anyone who has ever been referred to as a “dev” needs to practice articulating the ideological or social case, and then using that to imagine use cases. What are the problems within the web now, what could we do about it, what could it look like, and what will inaction (the status quo) lead to?
A focus on infrastructure. There are so many creative and talented people developing great DApps with corresponding use cases, increasingly real world use cases too. Blockchains, though, in my opinion, will only become mass adopted if the focus is moved towards infrastructure over apps. It’s my sense that Nodle gets this. Everyone already understands that we live online. So again, back to the social and ideological case, what kind of life [online] do we want? And how do the current configurations of technology impede or enable that? For me as a researcher this is about platform capitalism. People hate platform capitalism, but they are engaging in it constantly. Blockchain can move us post-platform and to bona fide, vibrant, internet infrastructure.
A focus on partnerships. This part is crucial, and dangerous. Public policy researchers often say that public policy happens “where the rubber meets the road”—we can have a great idea in theory but how it’s implemented is what really matters. So what does it mean for Web3 to partner with Web2? I sense it can mean a lot of things. It can be the reproduction of a lot of old inequities that we see in the proliferation of the platform internet. But can it mean something else? Mass adoption? The non-crypto-speculating public finally “getting it”? I really do think Nodle is well positioned here to offer Web2 companies and plausible partners like Instagram and Cash App and Square a clear rationale for why Web3. I do believe there are plenty of Web2 companies that see the writing on the wall for our platformized internet and want to move into Web3. Identifying those opportunities is challenging but it is worth it.
Mobility I think is key for more adoption. The use of NFT’s for concert tickets, travel on buses or planes, driving licences. Perhaps also focusing NFT’s on identity, with the coming regulations in Crypto, KYC and AML will be high priority. Identities in the real world can be easily faked and stolen, are NFT’s the answer?
People travel everyday, everywhere. I see many Web3 products all aimed at taking business in Financial sectors. DeFi vs FinTech… trust issues.
Crack travel and identity with NFT’s and the rest will come.
I’m going to disagree on the “frictionless” point. Obviously we want to be frictionless eventually but we shouldn’t start by focusing on that. Instead we should find a population of users who have a burning need which is so important that they are willing to put up with the clunky MVP.
Once we have built something which solves their problem, and got the early adopters on board, we can think about how to reduce the friction or add more features to expand to a larger userbase.
If we want to make an impact on the real world and onboard the next billion crypto users, we need to consider how we can impact these users without having to “onboard them to crypto”. We need to meet them where they are instead of onboarding them to our tools and ecosystem.
This is exactly what we’ve been working on at Subsocial with our recently released Off-Chain Signer tech that utilizes proxies.
It gives us a UX on par with what Web2 users know. You can see the original implementation on Grill.chat, or try it now on PolkaVerse where you can get started with just an email and password. Any applications built on Subsocial can leverage this to provide a seamless UX that even my grandma can use.
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(open-source) consumer hardware.
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I alpha dropped InfraDAO on AAG today. It’s our hope that we will be able to build an AWS style system on chain that allow entities to trustlessly purchase, receive and use a variety of infrastructure related services that are provisioned from a variety of independent services providers on chain. The IBP was the first step on this process to allow us to better understand how this would be done, and help us to bootstrap capital by providing these critical infrastructure services to market.
However, we believe that by developing (for example) modules for control panels like Plesk, WHM/Cpanel it’s possible to allow a reseller to expand their service offerings utilizing the chain while transparently on-boarding end-users to blockchain enable services. We believe there are quite a few of these areas where we can bring blockchain enabled services to end-users transparently. These are the avenues we will be looking at.
I think the real power of the blockchain is enabling corporations at the protocol level where people can interact with these “protocorps” (Protocol Corporation) as buyers of services, sellers of services, or a variety of employee level functions (marketers, administrators, etc). While infrastructure related services like this one, crust, or things like helium are fairly obvious, I think it’s possible to turn almost any business model into a protocorp. Protocorps democratize large business models as sort of employee owned businesses, but the employees in this case are small businesses themselves.
You get rid of the board of directors, executives, stock holders and most director functions and instead put in place a protocol that performs the function of these individuals. By doing this, we end up in a situation where you have Uber or Airbnb, but the drivers and property owners are the Owners, Operators and Managers of the company itself. This allows us to continue down a path of globalism but reorganize a significant chunk of society back into mom and pop small businesses ran out of their houses. By removing the profit incentive of executives and share holders, the profits flow back into the hands of the people.
I’ve been in crypto a long time and Polkadot is the first time where I thought this might actually be something that can change society.
We need more protocorps.
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Can you share or point me to the iOS Substrate client code that Nodle uses? On your GitHub repository I only see the NodleSDK binary (compiled XCFramework bundle). I am working on a Swift API and interested in how you handle that portion of code. Thanks!
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A bit late to the punch on this one but I also wanted to share a thought.
If we want to onboard people to web3, we (ecosystem) need to create compelling products / use cases that are enticing and bring value to people.
Agyle from Talisman gave a good talk about this at Polkadot decoded last year → Traverse the Paraverse – How Talisman is bringing multi-chain to the masses | Polkadot Decoded 2022 - YouTube
The summary is that, people will learn process and onboard to new products and technologies (even if there is friction) if the value and payoff for doing so is great enough.
The example used in his talk is the computer keyboard (and computers in general) - computers were difficult for the older generation to learn how to use, but the majority persisted because it unlocked massive benefits e.g. Talking with loved ones online, performing many activities from home (shopping, banking etc).
I feel like the Web3 UX is already quite good (of course could always be better) and like @tomi mentioned, if we can create use cases that are of such great value, people will learn and self teach to gain access to this value. At the same time, the UX can be improved over time to make it easier and easier to access this value.
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Yeah, B2C is the way. Blockchains need to be implemented at the Business level for serving individuals IE: Society as a whole. Individuals can not be the source of mass adoption of blockchain…