Ideas For Crypto Startups

As a builder and investor, I come across many under explored or under developed product ideas that I wish more driven founders were working on.

This page will be a living document of startups and products that I’d like to see exist. If you are building one of these things, definitely reach out to me!

• A fully decentralized offchain derivatives and margin exchange:

  Tom Howard @_TomHoward

  CRYPTO NEEDS DECENTRALIZED FTX Enough of these CEX rugs. This problem is a lingering chronic illness that has infected crypto since the dawn of Bitcoin. We must finally solve it once, and for all. But current DEXes don’t even come close to fixing the issue.

  • This could be made up of multiple independent sub systems:

    • Decentralized Offchain Order Book and Matching Engine

    • Cross chain settlement and clearing protocol

    • Decentralized Offchain Risk and Margin Engine

    • Liquidation and Auction Protocol

• Fully crypto native stablecoins

  Tom Howard @_TomHoward

  CRYPTO NATIVE STABLES The reliance on Circle, Tether and the banks behind all the stables is a massive existential risk for crypto. This needs to end now. We must stop relying on these assets for collateral or peg management. Time to take off the training wheels.

• Decentralized Affiliate marketing protocol

  Tom Howard @_TomHoward

  DECENTRALIZED AFFILIATE MARKETING Every interface should be able to include their address as a referee to earn a share of protocol fees. This will create a business model for UIs and reward users who run their own UI. I expect those UIs will be regulated in some places.

• Decentralized p2p fiat markets

  Tom Howard @_TomHoward

  ONE - Fiat Ramps Seamlessly turning fiat to crypto and back. USDC is the short term solution but also the poison pill. Coinbase works for US+EU (for now). Countries that completely ban it have the most robust system: a large network of small brokers that will locally exchange

  

• Non custodial consumer friendly wallet with a flexible recovery framework

  Tom Howard @_TomHoward

  TWO - Consumer Wallet Recovery Writing seed phrases on scraps of paper is both insecure and likely to be lost. This is not a good recovery mechanism. Neither is email or "cloud storage". Users need a safe, secure, and resilient way to recover their wallets when (not if) lost.

  

• A new kind of L1

  Tom Howard @_TomHoward

  Request for new Layer 1: - Nakamoto consensus (PoW) - Turing complete efficient VM (smart contracts) - 100% privacy - Interchain messaging standards - Rollup optimized No one is doing this.

• Non-EVM zk-applications. Imagine what you can build with any arbitrary offchain computation?

  Tom Howard @_TomHoward

  Uses cases for zk tech will explode in 2023, but we won't see most of these products until 2024

• A full on Network State

  Tom Howard @_TomHoward

  A Network State will launch with full census of citizens, passports, and taxes, in 2023