(Amazon) Prime time in web3

Tokenized versions of Prime will enable a number of different ownership models that further incentivize early adopters. Rather than offering their products for free until protocols emerge, smart consumer applications can leverage these models to create sticky behavior and strong loyalty. 

As consumers, our most valuable affinities will be to brands and communities, not specific products. 

Aggregation, acquisitions, and partnerships will happen at the product layer as much or more than in web2, even given an interoperable and composable landscape. People will want fewer rather than more Prime-like memberships, so established organizations with already successful products will have an edge on building or partnering with complementary ... See more

Here are a few predictions you might make if you buy the viability of this model:

Prime membership simultaneously drives adoption and usage of transactional products (eg buying TVs on Amazon) as well as other subscription products (eg Prime Video) and infrastructure/protocols (eg Amazon warehousing)Because Prime’s main purpose is to drive behavior on other services rather than revenue on its own, Amazon can ensure the benefits d... See more

There are a few elements of Prime that are very important and I believe transferable to web3 consumer applications:

We will need applications built on crypto rails to connect with friends, find restaurants, share photos, and so on. Those products will still feed the protocols underneath them, but they will also be expensive to build and only possible if they can capture significant value on the application layer.Enter membership moats.

Most of the widely adopted products right now are extremely transactional - apps that help you exchange tokens for example. As Jesse Walden correctly points out, these products should commoditize their applications in order to drive more demand for their truly differentiated product, the underlying exchange.

“The market cap of the protocol always grows faster than the combined value of the applications built on top, since the success of the application layer drives further speculation at the protocol layer. And again, increasing value at the protocol layer attracts and incentivises competition at the application layer.”