🤨 how is this free?

dApps that want to attract people who are new to crypto need to offer free access. These users don't have wallets or tokens yet, so your experience shouldn't require they jump through those hoops before even trying your dApp.

But using blockchain comes with a cost, so how can you just give that away for free? That doesn't make economic sense.

It probably seems obvious but you need to make enough revenue to offset the cost. A good experience will ultimately fail without profit.

For chains with gas fees, this is actually very difficult to accomplish because of how unpredictable your costs will be. Unless you're ensuring each transaction is profitable, your results will be variable. Even on inexpensive chains and many L2s, your costs could balloon over time, especially if your dApp manages to bring in a lot of new users.

These challenges are not insurmountable, but it's much easier to stick with the status quo of building dApps for the existing cadre of crypto millionaires.

It doesn't matter to me whether the crypto elite find my dApps. I'm building for people who haven't used blockchain before. It's easier for me to do that on Koinos than EVM chains. I've already paid the cost to acquire my KOIN, so now I own access to the blockchain. I can give away that access without any additional expenses. That makes it easy to offer a free experience.

-Luke

P.S. Kondor is leading by example by giving away mana in the latest version of the wallet: