Snapshot

Adoption Maximalist | Founder @gluenet

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Some context on Glue tokens: there are currently less than 20,000,000 tokens free floating (meaning not team or foundation) on the market. A fair chunk of those is still staked.

At current 0.07 per token market price, that means free floating market cap is under $2,000,000. The amount of buy pressure to 10X the price needed is minimal because there are few sellers left and liquidity is thin all the way up. Big things are coming.

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There are two high level ways to fund a project in crypto.

1. The Web2 way:
Raise what you need. Build. Find product-market fit. Raise a bit more. Repeat.
It’s disciplined, iterative, and designed around long-term ownership and sustainable exits.

2. The crypto way:
Raise a massive Series A, then an even bigger Series B, go “public” early with a token, and let retail liquidity bail out early investors. No one would do this in Web2 because it’s suicidal dilution.

But in crypto, the public listing happens so soon that everyone forgets it’s the same math: Someone still sells to exit. And they always do. Usually the team finds a way to exit early despite lockups because they know it’s not sustainable.

The result: projects that become obsessed with pumping the token instead of building the product. They have to because they raised so much. So they raise more and more, earlier and earlier, just to defend price optics.

At Glue we’ve done the opposite. We’ve stayed lean, raised only what we needed, and kept our token structure tight. Because when the product hits real traction, scarcity becomes leverage. Small raises means less tokens out there. Once demand grows, price quickly goes parabolic. We are approaching that inflection point.

Most “Web3” projects play short-term token games. We’re playing the long-term ownership game.

Be careful what you buy. Tokenomics, dollars raised and who owns the float still decide who wins, just as it always has.

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Glue isn’t building a protocol.
We’re building a brand.

No one knows or cares if their money moves via SWIFT or IBAN. Most people don’t even know what those are.

That’s what Glue does for crypto. We are the user-facing layer, the name people know and trust. The place you go when you have a real job and a real life and don’t want to spend 30 hours a week learning which lending protocol just got forked again.

That’s the power: Glue becomes the App Store of crypto. We bring the users, we surface the best products, and we take a percentage of the value flowing through.

Buy protocol tokens if you want to bet on one team.
Buy Glue if you believe the future belongs to whoever aggregates the best and turns it into a frictionless, trusted experience.

Protocols will rise and fall.
Glue wins no matter which ones do.

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Glue’s philosophy is simple.

A user should be able to touch 95% of all crypto TVL, be that swaps, lending, perps, NFTs, gaming etc. all from one UX that is the Glue Hub.

They shouldn’t need to know which chain a token lives on, because they can trade it on Glue.
They shouldn’t care if it’s EVM, SVM, or something else entirely, because they can access it on Glue.
They don’t need to learn a dozen lending protocols because they can just use the abstracted aggregation on Glue.

One UX.
95% of crypto.

That’s how crypto wins, when the chain doesn’t matter anymore, only the experience does.

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Every chain and protocol obsesses over liquidity, TVL and TPS. All backend stuff.
No one talks about how much of crypto a user can actually touch from a single UX.
That’s the real metric.

After all, why would a user trying to do $200 swap from USDC to USDT in any way care if you have $100MN or $200MN local TVL?

Your UX surface = how much of crypto you give users access to without making them leave. If they can swap, lend, bridge, restake, buy, and pay all from one place, you’ve got a broad UX surface. Even better if they can tap into liquidity from all protocols out there instead of just local ones. If they have to jump apps or switch chains, you’ve got friction.

Right now crypto is a bunch of disconnected UX islands. Each one shouting “mass adoption” while forcing users to swim (and drown on the way) between them.

Maximizing UX surface means connecting all of it, so one starting point lets you reach everything. All assets, all chains, all categories.

That’s how you win. Not by owning liquidity, but by owning access to it. Whoever controls the UX surface controls the flow of value.

That’s where Glue lives.

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If you’re disappointed in finding out how the Binance listing process works, just know VCs are even worse. 70% of pitch calls with VCs I’ve been on they had zero interest in the product, the team, the vision or the roadmap.

The only questions are: how much is our discount to TGE/spot? How fast is TGE? No lockup right?

Majority of funds are in the business of funding pump and dumps that pretend to build something so they can dump on retail. They are in bed with the CEXs to get listings at discounted rates, that’s the real benefit many of them offer besides marketing and social proof (god knows why people follow VC investments without knowing the terms).

Shoutout to the other 30% of real VCs that spent hours with us to really understand the product! Love you guys!

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To sum up: Ethereum actually tries, and that already puts it ahead of almost everyone else.

They have a basic but relatively bad onboarding flow, a wallet guide, and a dApp showcase that's half decent.
But the execution still screams “by developers, for developers.” It makes it clear that you will need HOURS of study to figure this out.

But at least it also implies: "We DO want you to join us!" Way ahead of Solana there.

Retail users don’t need 48 wallet options and a research paper on how to get ETH. They need a guided path that just works end-to-end.

Ethereum comes closer than anyone so far, but it’s still missing the simplest truth in user acquisition: clarity beats optionality.

Until crypto learns that, the next billion users stay off-chain.

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Next in my series: Crypto UX is Awful.

Let’s talk about @ethereum, because unlike most chains, they actually try!

Starting with the homepage https://t.co/xBEnzDpfjg has a little onboarding guide! This is outstanding news, since this is likely the page that most new users would hit first (besides BTC related things).

They even do a good job in breaking things down into three easy to digest steps:
1. Pick a Wallet
2. Get ETH,
3. Try apps.
This seems entirely figure-out-able to someone who doesn't know anything about crypto.

More importantly this says: "We actually want retail users to join us. We care, which is why it's the first thing we put onto our homepage."

Minor miss: The guide is below the fold.

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Step 3: Apps.

Finally, something that makes sense.

There’s still no real funnel connecting step 2 to step 3, most users probably wandered off to a CEX to buy ETH and never came back, but the dApp page itself? It’s actually decent.

They highlight three apps at the top: 1inch, Polymarket, and Cowswap. Two are redundant, I’d swap one for an NFT platform, but the idea is right: start here, these are useful to beginners.

Below that, a longer list of other dApps, a decent structure. Lead with 3, expand for power users.

And linking out to Twitter at the bottom? Smart touch. Exposure to the culture helps retention.

It’s not perfect, but for once, it feels like someone thought about users! Very odd that they chose to be opinionated (and therefore useful) on this step but not on the first two steps that are arguably more complicated.

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Solana’s marketing problem isn’t technical, it’s philosophical.

They built a world-class protocol and wrapped it in an anti-user experience. No funnel, no guidance, no empathy.

If crypto keeps "onboarding" like this, it’ll never escape being a niche playground for insiders. If we want mass adoption, we need to stop teaching users to code and start showing them how to just use the product.

Because right now, this homepage just says:

“We built something incredible. Good luck figuring it out, we sure ain't helping.”

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Let’s break down @solana’s user “onboarding.”

Spoiler: if a professional growth marketer set out to design the perfect way to ensure no retail user ever touched Solana, they’d build https://t.co/MzLnU2ot8a.

Let’s be generous and assume their goals are:
- Onboard users to use Solana
- Onboard developers to build on Solana
- Shill investors to buy Solana tokens

Whoever built that site focused 100% on devs, vaguely on token buyers and completely forgot users.

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It’s honestly hard to know where to start fixing this, it’s that bad. I promise I'll be more constructive on the next one of these (some protocols only do a bad job).

Imagine if Facebook in 2009 had a homepage explaining how amazing social media will be, why it will change the world, and then a bunch of messaging for developers with no registration flow.

And if you actually wanted to sign up, you’d be sent to a 10-part series on how to do it, after about 40 hours of study.

That’s https://t.co/MzLnU2ot8a.

It sends one clear message to anyone not already deep in crypto:

“Stay away. You’re not smart enough. Use a CEX instead.”

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Got some helpful feedback from a friend:
Apparently crypto isn’t purposefully doing a terrible job at user acquisition, most teams just don’t know what an acquisition funnel or CPA even is.

God knows who’s been hiring the “marketing people.”

So, to be constructive, I’ll start a series breaking down major crypto sites, what’s broken, and how to fix it.

Let’s make crypto usable!

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The TradFi takeover of crypto is underway.
They are playing it perfectly.
And crypto is handing it to them on the altar of “price go up”.

Tradfi waited until the market was big enough. Now that the infrastructure and liquidity exist, they’re moving in with scale and polish, both of which crypto lacks and refuses to adopt.

They know how to execute. Crypto clearly doesn’t.

They know CTO-led projects won’t drive mass adoption. So they’re bringing in product, marketing, and regulatory muscle.

They’ll sell crypto to their existing customer bases, billions of people who already trust them and absorb the promise of decentralization into a permissioned system they control. The next wave of crypto brands will be Blackrock, Fidelity and co.

They have no intention of letting the cypherpunks participate. They want maximal moats, not open systems, like any decent businessperson.

You can already see it happening.

- Major partnerships between financial institutions and top VCs (Paradigm, BlackRock, Fidelity). The VCs were never on the side of crypto. They will happily switch to a new team to keep their funds performing.

- Lobbying teams built to make crypto “legal enough” for entry. Next they’ll pivot to building regulatory moats to keep everyone else out.

- You’re delusional if you think US Politicians care about the crypto ethos. They care about owning the industry inside their borders and extracting value. It will be the opposite of what crypto was meant to be.

The national security argument will be next:
“Money infrastructure is critical, only trusted institutions should run it, as they have for centuries.” And frankly, with how badly crypto is behaving, it’s hard to argue that they are wrong. National security sensitive infrastructure being run by pretend DAOs and shadow cabals, with no visibility into the ownership behind it is a bad idea.

Even the worst DC PR person could run a marketing campaign to sway public opinion against “real” crypto. They have SO much ammo.

The tragedy is that much of crypto is cheering this whole process on. The mission of open, neutral finance has been replaced by “whatever pumps the price.” The OG builders are mostly gone. VC-backed pump-and-dump “builders” dominate the spotlight. Projects with long term vision and mission are ignored because price doesn’t go up immediately. Better buy the latest meme coin.

The crypto ecosystem is making the best possible case in support of: Adults need to take over.

Crypto is eating itself.
The industry that was supposed to disrupt power is busy handing it back to the same gatekeepers that have always run it to pump the price one last time.

With how it’s going, the next cycles “crypto winners” will be tokenized tradfi stocks because they will be running crypto by then. And they might do a better job of it, at least execution wise.

It’s not too late.
It can still be changed.
But it’s later than most people think.

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User-Facing Brands Will Win Crypto.

Crypto likes to think we are different. But history isn’t kind to that idea.

In Web2, user-facing brands won. Google, Amazon, Airbnb. Not the protocols, not the infrastructure, but the companies that built products people actually liked. No one cares what tech Robinhood is built on. It won because it had better user experience than the shitty TDAmeritrade app.

The same will happen in crypto.

Whoever builds the easiest to use, most fun, good-enough-tech product will own the users. And the users will stick with the brands because they will not care about TPS, TVL or whatever the next cycles buzzwords are.

People don’t care about marginal tech advantages or decentralization levels. They care about good products.

Right now, no major protocol even remotely offers a good enough experience to win. That’s why on-chain adoption is flat. Coinbase, with its CEX + Base combo, is the most advanced simply because it feels somewhat usable.

My thesis: Crypto’s multi-chain future may be real under the hood, but at scale there will be super-apps that unify everything. One UX that lets a user do anything without caring which chain it happens on.

It’s not multi-chain, it’s single-UX.

The nerds keep building for nerds. If we don’t fix the UX and appeal to everyone then CEXs and TradFi will catch up and own crypto too. They are already making aggressive moves and crypto is not adjusting.

Let’s get our shit together. Let’s build products and brands that real people like or the banks will take over and win.

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Crypto UX feels like IKEA furniture without the manual.
Everything technically works, IF you already know how to build it.
Most people don’t want to assemble finance.
They just want a finished table.
Whoever ships the table wins.