From Bloomberg via Advisor Perspectives, March 17:
Apple Inc. is a $2.5 trillion company. To significantly boost that bottom line, the company has only so many opportunities it can pursue. Self-driving cars and mixed-reality glasses come to mind (as much as I love the Ted Lasso cinematic universe, it won’t move the needle).
There’s another massive opportunity that the iPhone maker has been fairly mum on: crypto. “Apple’s position on crypto is between neutral and hostile,” says Ric Burton, an early contributor to the Ethereum project. “However, iPhone could be the tool that on-boards millions of people to the ecosystem.”
How? By creating a user-friendly way to interact with the crypto economy.
“You have to remember that Apple is a company that makes products for people to access protocols,” Burton tells me, noting that the iPod helped users interact with the MP3 standard while the iPhone does the same for internet standards.
Crypto is a set of protocols, and there are many tools to interact with it. But as designer and tech advisor Holyn Kanake recently wrote for CoinDesk, “[these products] are miles away from decentralization, aggressively technical and composed of discordant user interfaces.”
The point was hammered home in January when Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike wrote a viral post titled “My First Impressions of Web3.”
He observed that crypto’s promise of a decentralized tech stack is running up against human behavior: “People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will.” (My rough translation: We default to simple and lazy.)
Burton believes that the iPhone — which more than 1 billion people carry in their pockets for everyday use — can alleviate this problem in two ways:
- Safari browser extension: One of crypto’s biggest on-boarding tools so far is Metamask, a Chrome extension crypto wallet with 21 million users. Apple’s iOS 15 update in November provides more browser extension support. And with 54% of mobile traffic in America coming from Safari, there’s an opportunity for more crypto iPhone tools....
....MUCH MORE
