Even after nearly four years of buzz and rapid market growth, the crypto market remains a major disappointment for users. Existing platforms don’t meet users’s needs as much as they should, allocate minimal resources for tech support and pay zero attention to education and accommodation of their clients, let alone any worries about managing new traders’ fears and psychological pressure.

When you use a banking app, your actions are simple, buttons are big and expected outcomes are clear. Nine out of ten ‘traditional’ stock market brokers will offer you a warming-up session to learn the market basics and a solid pack of in-house research papers to study companies and indexes in detail. Real estate firms have emulators to show you how the furniture fits in your future apartment, and what view is available from the balcony.

None of this is available at crypto exchanges today. There are over 200 players in the market, and counting. But feverish online traffic and screaming ads remain their priority. Unlike other grown-up and established B2C markets, digital assets lack entertainment and gamification elements. The problem is absurd: it is difficult to gather a proper list of existing samples as there are not enough to compile a list.

The solution is obvious: ask the client, talk to the client, test your product with the client and be receptive and responsive. Well, that’s what Nominex intends to do. Let’s walk down the road of gamification, existing market ugliness and bottlenecks, and their plans.

Games That People Play

People always loved to play. Games were one of the most important elements of human life since mankind acquired consciousness. It goes deeper than that: animals, including our closest relatives, apes, favor non-productive activities but primitive games have little in common with complicated forms of entertainment people enjoy.

Offline and table games are widely spread: take go as an example, the game with at least 27 million players all across Asia and beyond. Card games are even more common, so is the game of chess. With rules long forgotten, games come to us through ages — archeologists found stone desks and figures in ancient Egypt tombs and even neolithic caves.

Online Era Gaming

But the internet and the functionality of global online connections happened to be ‘a game-changer’ in the most literal way: an online game leader, the game called PlayerUnknown’s BattleGround managed to hit an astonishing figure of 227 million fans and players globally, still below the record of chess (c.650 million) but yet very impressive.

The trend started to accelerate in recent decades with more and more people working part-time, moving to creative jobs like design, programming and content production of all sorts. Millions around the globe became full-scale rantiers. All those people went into more and more gaming and game-alike activities to (a) spend their free time having fun and (b) catch up on creative thinking and facilitate their main fields of work.

Not surprising at all that businesses reacted by adding significantly to their promotion strategies and employed more gamification methods than before. Gamification became common for retailers, taxi services, education companies, touristic companies and even the most conservative of all, financial institutions.

What Can Gamification Do

Gamification is a form of motivation and stimulation. It goes well both in human resource management and in client relations. The former uses gamification to improve the level of competition between employees (like, introducing ‘the employee of the month’ / ‘department of the month’ titles or producing a system of grades in the company). But sales and client service business arms brought this process to a whole new level.

The trick is that a person’s mind works the same regardless of one’s social status and, to be frank, most other factors, like income or funds possessed. People do like winning, people do enjoy appreciation, people are fond of solving puzzles and they generally tend to get excited about prizes and competitions.

To clear things up, here is a list of areas where gamification can help:

• in acquiring new clients and bringing them to test the product
• to help them learn about a product’s functionality and the way it works
• to increase overall awareness of the sector, business, and associated risks
• to stimulate additional activity, increase depths of involvement and sell extra
• to improve retention rates and increase client loyalty.

Gamification takes different forms: companies create games to demonstrate features of their product, they present users with quizzes and puzzles, set series of tasks to be solved for a specific period, and more.

For example, Australia’s Commonwealth Bank produced a full-scale Sims-alike (or Monopoly-alike) Investorville where clients can make investments in real estate objects, manage and sell those thus emulating real market behavior of an investor. Another example is Adidas’ replica of Super Mario where the character is wearing a branded outfit adding to the trademark’s recognition.

There are hundreds or even thousands of other examples. But the good part of the story ends here as soon as we add four-letter words like USDT. Traditional industries were gamification’s sweethearts, and crypto proved to be the ignorant bastard, the ugly duckling, the neglecting cheating boyfriend, you name it…

All Those Greedy Unprofessional Fellows…

The world of crypto appeared to be a complete failure in terms of implementing any gamification other than ‘bring a friend — get a dollar’ basics. But crypto still (a) has no sign of a product, (b) no understanding that the newly coming persons need to be accommodated.

Now, you might never read anything like this published openly but let’s acknowledge one simple fact: most of crypto founders are rather dumb, greedy and lame. They and their ‘teams’ went to school but mostly to paw their young fellow classmate beauties and smoke behind the corner.

How do we know that? Nearly all crypto products are lame and very simplistic. It is obvious to any observer that there was no attention paid to UX/UI, not to mention tutorials, demo videos, test runs and things like that. The majority of ‘crypto exchanges’ are screaming that they were created by a bunch of morons who only wanted to have their cut of the pie (i.e. crypto hype) asap and there was no long-term thinking made.

Most ‘product builders’, if you may call them so, are kindergarten level amateurs. As a result, most products are heavily loaded, complicated (badly engineered) and look terrible. Meanwhile, user experience and comfortable interface are the two most important elements for those who come unprepared.

People Come — And People Go

As a result, we are witnessing a crazy situation when millions of dollars are spent on ads and funnels, and nobody/nothing meets people where they are headed. New users arrive at the trading platforms, fail to register, can’t understand even the most basic stuff: deposits and withdrawals, making bids, analyzing their portfolio.

They depart unhappily and often make a general decision that crypto is not for them. This happens because when choosing between ads and product development, founders always say ‘ads!’ and don’t give a rat’s ass about anything else. The motto is: wham, bam, thank you, mam, or let’s skip the hard part and bang, bang, bang the audience with tasty leads that have nothing behind them.

Why so? Founders of crypto services didn’t care about capitalizing anything long-term, they just wanted their part of the profit on the table now. They always saw the audience as ‘hamsters’, some sort of cannon meat. Seventy percent joiners bounce back? No worries, we’ll find more fools to test our lame system in the next round. No care about The Greater Good, no respect for people you are to serve.

How Nominex Approach Is Different

That is where Nominex acts differently. From the very beginning, they decided to avoid mass spending on marketing campaigns. Instead, they spent several hundred hours on prototyping and testing to find what’s important for The User, the most important actor.

The exchange believes that gamification is a perfect way to assist their newly joined friends — and they believe that diamonds are every girl’s best friends, while users are true friends of ours. In today’s world, over 1 billion people are playing. The overall statistics numbers are easy to obtain: go see Twitch streaming audience, and their figures say it all.

Psychologically, 99% of gamers are traders. Trading comes naturally to them as game quests are very similar to those tasks solved in trading: choice of strategy, consistent attention, competition and risks taken, just like you do in every shooter or MMORPG.

Speaking of client sources, any crypto exchange can target several big audiences: traditional finance, forex, other crypto sectors, and gaming. But people from nearly every one of those channels need some adaptation help, and that’s where Nominex steps in big-time. 

There are plenty of ways you can assist your new customer by entertaining him or her at the same time:

• demo mode trading which allows to learn all basics and test advanced solutions, like bots, different types of orders and market strategies,
• tournaments and other competitive elements,
• contests with real prizes,
• rankings and achievement points,
• team activities,
• and more, more, more.

Looking more specifically at crypto exchanges, there are many entertaining (and rewarded) types of activities that may be mutually helpful for the client and the exchange: trading competitions to maximize profit or turnover, ‘stars-rewarded’ educational courses, token exchanges, listings and holding, referral trees, and points-valued teamworks, deposits and profit retaining horizons, use of native tokens, special pricing and/or discount programs and coupons.

The Nominex team is working on all that is mentioned above, and most importantly — will deploy things and forms that are the most important to the market and produce the best effect for their clients.

We’ve discussed these plans with the team, and came to realize how much resources have been allocated to customer development and building the product, as well as to testing clients’ needs and defining the most desired functionality. Lots of A/B testing, prototyping and dry runs to facilitate something that perfectly suits the market needs.

To Sum Up

Again, let’s put this blank: most crypto teams have zero experience and expertise in working with heavy digital products, they rather act like horse breeders. With several nice exceptions, there is NO product in crypto at all. Crypto initiatives mostly targeted the most simplistic needs of their founders and owners while completely ignoring The Client.

Nominex plays differently. They aim to mix all product features that are important for You and make custdev their top priority. The main objective of every user’s accommodation system is to mitigate new clients’ fears and to help people combat those.

In one year they will be everything you dream the fine crypto exchange to be. Please join the team and help them find the best way to do so.