Understanding what mass affinity is and how to reach a billion users

While you were enjoying eating salad with your family, I decided to prepare a great post for you in the morning so you can start the new year with something healthy while sipping your mineral water.

Tal Kol, the founder at Orbs, is a very smart man with a lot of experience with apps, users and development. He has been an entrepreneur all his life.

Kol is interested in infrastructure projects for users and has always thought about mass adoption of blockchain applications, which is how Orbs came to be. All of his early years at Orbs were centered around Ethereum. In interviews, he keeps referring to Ethereum as a technologically complex tool that will never be embraced by people. “Ethereum is not a blockchain for mass adoption. My mom will never use it,” he says.

When Telegram posted a White Paper in 2018 he saw that Nikolai Durov's concept was very similar to what he was promoting. TON shines new colors in his eyes, and in 2021, when he saw that Telegram had staked on it, he began to participate in the ecosystem.

It came as a surprise to me when he said that the Ethereum code is centralized, and that its code is run by a corporation (I didn't know). “Ethereum, Google or Uber won't let you do a fork of their services, their code is closed, but TON, on the contrary, is as open as possible and makes an honest platform with a concern for users' interests. Not because it makes more money, but because people need it. After all, if TON becomes a bad blockchain or users see that the project is developing the wrong way, people will just do a fork and be a better version," says Kol.

A little earlier Tolya Yanot wrote that TON will overtake Ethereum in the number of active users, Kol says similarly: “Ethereum or Solana. None of them have a chance to compete with TON in terms of mass adoption. We’ll catch up to them in terms of the number of users. I'm not worried, it won't take long.”

He goes on to give an example in which blockchain trumps centralization. “The big problem with all centralized systems, without blockchain, is that I build, say, a product or application system, and you are my user. I build a Google search, and you want to search on my platform. I build an Uber, you want a ride on my platform. When they tell you how the platform works, they make you certain promises, like I will send a car to you very quickly and write how long it will take. You don't know how it works, but you have to trust them. And they have an incentive to deceive you. Why? Because they’re making money off you. But you’re not part of the ecosystem. You are the product, you are the customer. You’re not a stakeholder, nobody cares about you. And what web3 and blockchain allow us to do is create products that give assurances to users. So, for example, if I want to create a search and I can demonstrate that the search results are not manipulated. So, on blockchain, we can create products that give guarantees to end users about certain aspects of those products. And it keeps the integrity of the system, kind of bypassing governance,” says Kol.

He also mentions people coming out of VK and Telegram. “These people understand what mass affinity is. They know how to reach a billion users, unlike Ethereum.”

And lastly, he has some very wise words. “You know, there’s more to what we do than just writing code. We’re trying to create a movement, and in order to create a movement, the best way to have the biggest impact is to inspire other people to go in the same direction. I want you to be a part of TON and not because I’m going to make money from TON, but because we want to build something bigger than ourselves. Ultimately, TON will become a better ecosystem for users.”

Thank you to the TON&Co team for the interview. It was helpful and interesting.

For the full video interview see here.

Vudi is the author of a channel about TON @investkingyru_en and an active participant in the TON ecosystem. He is also the founder of the blockchain collection kingyTON, based on the historical events of the TON project ton.org.in. If you find errors in this post, please let Vudi know on Telegram @kingyru.