Everyone in crypto would agree we need more apps. Mostly everything is speculation and gambling, which leaves plenty of opportunity for some apps that offer some good old fashioned, wholesome fun. The problem is these users are most likely already satisfied with what they have in web2 alternatives.

Crypto and web3 is often branded as an internet where users own their data - see @cdixon's book Read Write Own. Ok, but what does that mean? Do people who use the existing internet care about this? I don't think so. Mostly everybody is happy with existing options on the internet. Mostly everybody is not a content creator that wishes their take rate was higher.

But, there's the famous quote that is often attributed to Henry Ford:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
- possibly Henry Ford

In December last year, I launched an app that's a classic word search game but allows the user to "own" their games by minting them as NFTs with a Coinbase smart wallet in the app.

Sean

@robenalt89

I launched another mobile app and I need some testers.

A word search game that any one of any age can play. Prompt AI with a theme, and find words in the grid. There’s a Coinbase smart wallet you can use to mint the game on Base.

Amount: $10 USDC
Deadline: 1/1/25

@bountybot

It's called Prism. Why did I build it? My girlfriend and I hosted my grandma at my house one night last fall. She's 90 and still sharp as a tack. We asked her how she does it; she said keeping her brain sharp is a big factor. We were playing word search games out of a book that night. I decided to build the app based on that conversation. I used an LLM to help me write the code for it and launched it in a few weeks. I didn't look at competition, analyze the market or any of that until after I launched it.

The top app in the word category in the Apple App Store has 500k ratings. I'm sure it has been played by millions of people.

What's inside the app? It's a basic word search game. There is also levels you reach for completing games, and you can even buy "coins" using in-app purchases. The coins let you play ad-free and buy "collectibles". You earn a stamp, which is a kind of collectible in the app, every time you reach a new level. You also earn coins for every new level reached.

Ok so users of this app, presumably millions, already understand the concept of coins and collectibles. They understand that by putting in time or resources (paying money), they can acquire resources that live inside this app and are valuable to this app experience.

Now begs the question: would these users, presumably millions, have an incentive to switch to using the Prism app that I built? The Prism app is also a basic word search game, and you can also buy collectibles in the app when you complete games. It's just a slightly different experience. First off, games are not spoon fed to you in Prism, because you prompt an AI to create any theme you want. Then, when your Prism game is completed, you can mint it as an NFT (collectible) with the Coinbase smart wallet in the app.

The experiences really are quite similar. I didn't even play Word Search Explorer before making Prism, and my game still ended up almost the same. There's even a collectibles tab in the web2 game, similar to the NFT feed in Prism.

The only thing Prism is missing is a canonical token that users can earn by playing. The Word Search Explorer users already understand the dynamics of the game, so why should I not launch a token, with some programmability to it that enables transfers to users as they complete levels in Prism?

With a token for Prism, Prism would quite literally be the exact same as the web2 version, but with web3 powering the app experience. It's literally building the next era of the internet, which is the subtitle to Chris Dixon's book. Users could earn coins by playing and then they could take their coins and do whatever they want with them on decentralized markets. If you buy coins on the Word Search Explorer game, those are in-app purchases and are useless outside of the app. If you collect stamps or buy other collectibles in the Word Search Explorer game, same thing: useless outside of the app. In Prism, you can take your collectibles and your wallet and do whatever you want with them, including sell them on secondary NFT marketplaces.

Assuming there was a token, and we agree that leveraging crypto in this example enables new dynamics and composability for the assets a user acquires in the game, then we're left with two problems. One, how do we get users to use the web3 version instead of the web2 version? Two, how do we make the token and the collectibles earned by playing the game actually worth something? I'm not sure the answer to either of these questions. I'm sure the happy users of the web2 app would not tell you they want these features. If we could figure out how to make it obvious to them that it's a better alternative, then we're left with a similar situation Henry Ford had.

These ideas are an extension of the thoughts in this blog post.