[Short #148] Cross-Chain Growth with Phantom and Opensea
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Cross-Chain Growth with Phantom and Opensea
There were a couple of announcements from notable names in Web3.
The first is from Phantom, a Solana wallet provider. Think of them as Metamask for Solana.
TLDR on Phantom’s announcement:
Phantom is expanding wallet support for Ethereum and Polygon
The product was founded with the intention of going multichain
The team is focusing on a seamless user experience. A single Phantom wallet can access your assets, regardless of blockchain
Additional features they are working on: Managing listings, burning spam, push notification updates, and showcasing your NFTs across different formats and devices
You can sign up for the waitlist to access the new Phantom wallet as it rolls out here
In early stages of growth, it makes sense to go deep. Focus on building a product for a specific use case/user and in the case of wallets, focus on one blockchain. For Phantom, it’s been Solana.
Non-Web3 examples of this are Amazon starting off with books, or focusing on one marketing channel for growth efforts until ROI starts diminishing. A professional/career development version of this is the t-shaped skillset framework.
As the product, features, and user base becomes more established, focus on breadth. Phantom is doing by expanding the blockchains they’re able to support.
Taking this one step further, with the right execution the T-shaped model eventually evolves into an ‘icicle’ model.
These aren’t novel concepts and it’s nice to see Web3 companies adopt these tried and true practices for growth. Web3 expands upon existing capabilities and frameworks, but most of the time the wheel doesn’t need to be reinvented.
The other observation here is Phantom’s incorporation of CRM and wallet/user communication. Currently, this is an open space with numerous companies and products like Daylight and Gated looking to be the partner of choice for more effective comms.
If Phantom is looking to be more than just a wallet (and that’s what it looks like), things get interesting.
How will these products respond to one-up the Phantoms of the world? How can they create value in ways that a wallet provider cannot? 🤔
In a separate effort, Opensea augmented their breadth strategy with the announcement that they now support BNB Chain (Binance Blockchain) NFTs.
With the addition of BNB Chain, Opensea now supports NFTs across 8 blockchains:
Arbitrum
Avalanche
BNB Chain
Ethereum
Klaytn
Optimism
Polygon
Solana
Is Opensea the marketplace leader for NFTs on all these blockchains? Nope. But I don’t think that’s the goal, at least for now.
Rather, they’re preparing for the eventual onboarding of new cohorts of users and positioning themselves as the one-stop shop for buying, selling, creating, and launching NFTs regardless of the blockchain.
Going back to an earlier piece on Opensea’s strategy, the addition of more blockchains supports a specific effort (Cross-Chain Partnerships), while the other efforts like Homepage and Collection Page Design are plug-and-play as they’re chain-agnostic.
The caveat here: At what point is supporting each additional blockchain additive to the overall business vs. subtractive? At this point where the focus is on building and laying the foundations for the (hopeful) future of 10x volume growth, this doesn’t seem to be a concern.
These announcements continue to be convince me that wallets are going to be the primary means of user acquisition. All the companies actively or preparing for wallet infrastructure seem to confirm this.
In fact, I think the terminology itself will evolve to Wallet Acquisition.
Wallets abstract away the user since a user can have multiple wallets, just like how a user can have multiple e-mails (there’s a reason why they’re called ‘signups’, not ‘users’). I’ll go one step further to argue that:
User Research ➡️ User Research + Wallet Research
User Experience ➡️ User Experience + Wallet Experience
User Analytics ➡️ Wallet Analytics (this positioning and related tools exist today)
Customer Relationship Management ➡️ Wallet Relationship Management
This doesn’t mean the user disappears or doesn’t matter, rather users are becoming more multi-dimensional than previously assumed and efforts in these disciplines become more nuanced provided there are enough resources.
There’s something here…I’ll may put more thought into this. Or maybe I’m just going off my rocker lol.
See you tomorrow!
Great piece, and thanks for sharing 😎
Great article, I look forward to your talk tomorrow on twitter.