User Research Report
The participants of this study are from Uganda, France, Venezuela/Spain, Turkey and Ireland. Since blockchain is borderless we won’t focus on the location and local behaviors and traits.
Most of the participants were between 30 and 38, there was only one who was younger ( a student ) and who particularly had all of the traits of degens.
Most of our participants were either Solidity devs, who were already working in blockchain space or who were trying to start working in the blockchain space, product managers in blockchain space and one student. Most of them were brought in the space by the fact that they were very into the blockchain culture. They were all enjoying their new freedoms and their rights to privacy and anonymity. Not all of them were here for the aim of getting rich overnight, in a way the crypto currency advantages were looked at as a result of the fact that they had adopted the blockchain culture especially Ethereum. One of the participants was very sophisticated and he was organizing meetups on blockchains topics, had a service based on an AI which was sorting crypto news and aggregated them in a newsletter. The same person was a PolkaDot Ambassador and he was planning to become an ETH2 Validator.
There was one exception - the sole degen of the study - who quote on quote wanting “passive income” and who has adopted in 2014 bitcoin and mined because he heard he could get good money.
All of the five were extremely risk averse and extremely cautious in terms of trusting anything. Three out of five had changed laptops in order to interact with our webapp. Due to the fact that the first participant told me that there was a possibility for his Metamask password to be stolen by me when he was pasting it into his browser extension I have decided to suggest to the participants to stop screen sharing when they were about to log in with their Metamask only to make them feel more comfortable.
All of the participants were extremely keen on DeFi. Superlatives were mostly used when asked to describe the DeFi space. Most of them are extremely content that the DeFi space is lowering the barriers for accessing financial products. The fact that is permissionless and without a middleman as the bank. They like the low fees and their freedom to make the transactions themselves. The sense of control over their funds it’s making them buzzing with excitement. Most of them like the lack of KYC and the anonymity blockchain and DeFi gives them.
They are all conscious of the risks that exist out there but they feel like there is a price they are ready to pay for these advantages.
One of the participants was one of the first people to use Maker and who told me that “ My CDP got liquidated this summer and I was very angry. I was so angry that I didn’t care of all of the DeFi projects that started emerging this year. But then Uniswap sent us their gift so I have received a lot of tokens and somehow my sense of strength was re-established so I started investing here and there again.”
The same participants was telling me that he and his friends are putting money in a vault ( I think it is a Multisig ) and they stake in different places with joined forces - so in a way he is more responsible and more attentive when he is investing somewhere due to the fact that his friends’ funds are in his hands, too.
I love it because it gave access to, to too many people. It gave us access to finance directly. Like I don't have to ask to my bank. I don't have to pay high fees to access to, I don't know, like finance market. I can do transaction myself. So of course there are risks because it's your own money and you, you can lose money very quick if you don't know what you're doing, but I love it because it's kind of the way I feel it. It's kind of like we are doing very important stuff and developing new, new, new technologies. And we are not asking banks what they think about it and what are their opinions. We are just doing this. Like, I don't know, creating new wallets. People can get access to money without having a bank accounts. And I don't like the way banks act act in the world actually. So I'm not very, I don't need, I don't, I'm not saying we don't need banks, but I just don't agree with their way of acting. Yeah. And, and this way of doing this without the need, asking their permission to do it, I think it's amazing.
Most of the Interview Participants are active members of communities living on different media channels. From the study it has resulted that most of them are active on twitter, telegram, whatsapp ( local groups )slack and Discord. Many of them are active on Discord on the projects’ servers where they go purposely to harvest their information.
Newsletters are also most appreciated and many of them are subscribed to cointelegraph and coin geko. Asked about the newsletter fatigue and how usually people get tired of reading newsletter - they subscribe and then they never open the newsletters - three of the participants assured me that they are opening and reading very consistently their newsletter containing crypto news.
They are prone to subscribe to weekly newsletters than daily ones. One of the participants has a service done with an AI that sends crypt newsletters - the AI coms through all of the crypto news and then sends a weekly newsletter and this is a pro bono feature started from his need for quality news.
Some of them are following crypto influencers- and see them as a beacon of trust and source of truth - but not all of them - mostly on twitter.
Some of them mentioned that they are listening to podcasts and are subscribed to youtube channels but unfortunately I couldn’t get exact names for these channels which means they either listen to many of them or they are not that important to remember their names.
Most of the users are staying quite informed and they do a lot of research on their end in terms of product discovery.
Three participants have caught my attention -
one of the participants has described to me how he follows coin geko all the time and whenever a news asset is listed and it’s in the top 50 he goes and checks the protocol’s/platform’s website. He usually goes and reads their whitepaper, checks the whole website, checks their team members and he looks into every each of them doing his due diligence and checking their background, their repos, their entire careers.
A participant from Uganda told me that he has a group of 7 friends with whom he has joined forces and with whom he does research about protocols and platforms - so even though he might not have time the other ones will and they will d the background check for all the protocols that catches their attention.
The third one is the one mentioned above with the AI service for crypto newsletter.
All of the participants are risk-averse, there none of them who is not extremely cautions - 3 out of 5 changed their laptops when asked to login with their wallet in this study.
Some of them were victims to hacks and some of them were very afraid of hacks so they are not people who would easily go into using product without a proper background search.
Most of the users have mentioned that they usually want to see the core team of a project at least if not the whole team. They like to go and check their linkedin profiles, github repos and on which other projects they have worked before. I was told that when they see a project with no team presented they do not even consider it.
Some user tells me how he believes that AAVE developers are very good because he met them in person at a meetup and they “ look like good people”. Which is a very irrational thing in a way but still - a good conclusion from this can be drawn - people do not trust anymore anonymous projects.
Tom Forde And know that something is safe. Well, I guess you look, You want to know if, if, if a platform has been audited. So I guess that was my, that was my benchmark, but I've since learned that even that doesn't mean it's safe because of these flash, these flashloan attacks that are possible. So yeah, I guess from my initial phase of just like just trying everything else and not thinking too much about safety when I was putting my money in here, putting the money in there, just, I just want to see how it works and yeah. Kind of being a bit reckless and losing some money that way through scams, which is basically like the team steals all the money because some of these platinum forums are like anonymous teams as well. You don't know who's buying them so that I kind of started, I guess, trying to lower my risk profile. So I started learning a bit more about, you know, trying to read contracts, trying to learn a bit of solidity so I can look myself, but then kind of definitely looking at looking at the audits and, and just like not trusting an anonymous team anymore. Like, you know, if I'm, if I'm going to put my money somewhere, I want, there are at least to be some faces behind it. And they look into the people who they are, what they're doing. Is there other investors, is there venture capital behind them? What's their background or how experienced are they?
Another very important thing regarding trust building is the possibility of the users to talk directly with the core team - either at meetups, conferences or even AMAs. Anything that means a direct connection to the members of the team increases users’ trust.
Another aspect that confers trust and a sense of comfort for users to entrust their funds into a protocol are audits. User are looking for the contract to be audited and they search for it to be published and be able to read the audit report. This is something that was mentioned by all of the participants and even the ones who cannot look into the code of a smart contract are interested in reading the audit report.
The audits are seen as a badge of trust from a protocol.
All participants are afraid of hacks some of them even had fallen victims to hacks, One of them did not want to disclose the details of the hack but the other which shows the traits of degens has told me that when he found out about DeFi he was very careless and he was investing and interacting with everything until he lost a bog amount of money.
The hack to which he refers is not quite a hack but he has fallen victim to Origin Protocol - he bought stable coins from them called OUSD but one member of the Origin Protocol team has left with all of the users funds.
For most of them is very important if a protocol or dex has been hacked. As soon as they hear about the hack they loose their sense of trust in that protocol and stop using or even considering them.
One peculiar behavior is for the degen who told me that he is using right now a platform which was hacked before he started to use it but since they have given their users back some amount of money back he consider that they are interested in existing in the long term so he constantly uses them - even right now he has some assets invested there. The protocol mentioned is called - Value DeFi
This is an interesting behavior and I consider is linked to the personality traits of this user - who is all about the passive income and fast gaining - all of the other participants were very unforgivable in terms of hacked protocols and they were not so much driven by the sense of enrichment but by the culture and tech.
All of the participants are checking the Whitepaper document when they are considering to interact with a protocol or they are just curious about it, Many of them are reading this in order to understand how the product works, what is it aiming for and if the project is trustworthy.
Something that shown up in this study was that most of the users trust a protocol if some other protocol or someone important in the crypto space refers it. For them these things are the source of truth so they might start quite biased their research.
This is another irrational thing that I kept on hearing from the users - even from one who doesn’t want to interact with different protocols from a defi aggregator, he goes directly to the protocols website in order to place his assets - but when he talks about something that he feels it’s safe he says it’s just a gut feeling.
Analyzing all of the things the users have told about this gut feeling - this is something more like Kahneman’s System 1 - which seems like a gut feeling but it’s a actually a decision made on top of their former experience. A lot of things are playing an important role in this gut feeling decision - the UI ( if everything looks nitty gritty and aligned and done by pros not by some children playing ), pretty much all of the criteria mentioned above are part of the factors that are giving this sense of trust and safety.
Our study has uncovered that there are three very important things for which users are using DeFi Aggregators:
A wholesome view of their total portfolio - many users have stated that they have been using Zapper.fi to see all of their assets. Sometimes they scatter their funds in many projects and they use aggregators to shed some light to this. They also claim to be very interested in portfolio visualization - bar charts, graphs or any kind of viz that gives us an image of their asset percentage and their token volume ( portfolio breakdown ) and to visualize all of their open positions.
Interest, price and returns - All of the users interviewed were very risk averse and did not have the courage to make huge moves but all of them were doing steadily small moves and they were looking for a safe and easy win this is why all of them were interested in Interest Rates and Returns - these are the exact words they have used and it is recommended that we use the same lingo as they do. Which means if they spot very quickly this information that they need they will return to use the aggregator again since it gives them a solution to their needs.
Gas Cost - A very important aspect for the uses is the Gas Price and the explanation around it - even some of them know that an aggregator might do a sum of actions within a transaction and that will influence the gas cost, if this is not explained upfront, some of them who do not understand the perks of the situation will think that this is happening due to some scammy business. They are all expecting to have some gas optimization done by the service.
I can’t see gas fees. Maybe that will be helpful. Or, you know, when the networks get really busy, you can kind of trick the system with advanced. You can, you know, manipulate the gas amount that you're going to use to run your transaction. So maybe that, that will be helpful if I can see them.
User 4
I think so when I mentioned that I hadn't used this type of functionality where they kind of, where they consolidate say two or three or four transactions into one check or they try and do that. I think I tried it at once. I can't remember what it was for, but I just remember seeing like a huge Gas price and I was like, okay, I'm not doing that, It had a huge gas fee. Yeah. So then I decided, okay, I'm not doing that. And then when I learned a bit more about it, I understood that like, okay, that's because there is like the equivalent of four transactions here and this one transaction, but, and I might have a, it might've even been, worked out cheaper than, you know, going off and doing those transactions individually. In fact, I'm, I think that's the idea, that's the whole point, but it's still stops. It still stopped me from doing that. And I'd still rather, you know, take each one of those transactions individually, just so like you have transparency, I know more of what is happening with these transaction and how much I'm paying for it.
User 5
Most of the users have used Zapper.fi as a DeFi aggregator and their use cases are diverse and interesting.
A particular case was the one of the degen who had been using Zapper as a means of education which leads us to a very interesting insight - many DeFi beginners might be using aggregators to learn more about DeFi since an aggregator should be an overview of the DeFi space.
Users’ Mental Model on DeFi Aggregators - since DeFi platforms and DeFi space is a very complex and intricate domain and most of the user want easy wins their expectations of this type of service is to take the cognitive load off their shoulders and do the heavy lifting of the financial strategies.
Most of them read on their own what the DeFi platforms are doing ( whitepapers, forums, podcasts ) but do not necessarily posses the abilities and know how to do investments, this is why they are interested in a service that could do that for them. They seem to be more interested in a very user friendly, human readable non-abstract way of how the service would do that work for them instead of the whole technical details ( at least the texts which explain the capabilities and the features of the product ).
They expect from a DeFi Aggregator Service to give them an overview of all of the DeFi Platforms - especially aggregated interest rates - and to make it easier for them to move a position from a platform to the other without going through the whole hassle of accessing each platform, connecting to each of them close the position, open it in a different platform and so on.
Some of the users are very disciplined in their actions so they keep records themselves and build their own ways of interacting with the DeFi space so a service that would do all the things from above would really hit the spot. The catch here is that the service should be easy enough to use and better and cleverer than what they already have otherwise they do not seem to see the advantage of putting the effort into learning a new product.
Yeah, both. Both. I would use it because currently I'm using an Excel file to manage my, my cryptos. So it's not very easy to manage. I'd would also look at the fees, because if it's, if it's not interesting for me, I would stay with my Excel sheet and on, I am doing my transaction by myself, but I would try, I think, with a little amount, see the advising AI and see how I, if it works well, I will compare it with another one. I totally forget the name, but I think I have it. Let me look at the name. It's okay. She seems okay. Yeah. I hope I have it in my mind. Something like, I think it's because I'm sharing, I counter access portfolio.
User 2
Most of the users have used Zapper. For some of them it was a gateway to DeFi, for others is a means to find forgotten assets and an overview of their invested funds, but none of them are really using Zapper for investments. This information is of course only representative for the people we have talked to.
Some of them prefer to use directly the defi platforms because they do not trust third party services, others because they want to experience them directly.
All of them would use the aggregator if it would do something that they cannot do directly in the DeFi platforms/protocols. ( e.g. move positions from one protocol to an other, AI services, strategic services, farming services - and Zapper does not provide anything like that from what they’ve told me}