It has been said that successful consumer products map to one of the seven deadly sins. Tinder, Instagram, and Netflix represent Lust, Vanity, and Sloth, respectively.

Consumer crypto is no different—our products must compete for dominance within a sin in order to gain adoption with mainstream users. New products win through high differentiation that makes them 10x better than incumbents.

So we must ask ourselves, does adding crypto to a product make it better at Gluttony than Uber Eats, better at Wrath than Twitter, better at Pride than Linkedin? — I think not.

The only sin that crypto helps with is Greed. Crypto apps sell the idea that using them will make you richer. This puts them in competition with other apps that sell the same idea, such as Robinhood, Draft Kings, and Coinbase.

Let's look at some of the most successful consumer crypto apps. Crypto: The Game is my favorite. It’s a cutthroat game with a giant pile of cash at the end (I love it). Similary, Polymarket is making waves by letting us bet on real-world events. In both of these, the winners take the money of the losers.

Crypto makes these products better than their legacy alternatives, so they can engage a wider audience. On the flip side, when an app is not able to break out of crypto native users, an insider group of attention-deficit gamblers (and swarms of bots) wring it dry and drop it like a hot potato for the next new thing.

Friend.tech did $90m in volume and were hailed as the future of social media—but they just shut down. Why? Because they found PMF in Greed, and their v2 didn't introduce a new game to play for money. The update focused on broader adoption, but it didn't threaten incumbent apps in any of the deadly sins.

Farcaster gained adoption within crypto because users were printing money from $DEGEN tips, but the founders say it doesn’t have differentiation for mainstream users yet.

So, if you're building in consumer crypto and you have aspirations to take your product mainstream, I hope you like casinos, because you’re building one.