Can Crypto Help Win the Super App War?

From Big Tech to social media to retail, a growing number of companies are trying to build the “Super App” that seven in 10 consumers say they want.

In a perfect world, this one-stop-shop digital doorway would have banking, savings, credit, retirement and payments all in one spot. Some of them, like the WeChat-based version Elon Musk says he wants to build on the foundation of Twitter, would roll in social media and a trove of personal and marketing data that would come with it.

“Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” Musk said in an Oct. 4 tweet, building on earlier comments about turning Twitter into an app like WeChat that Chinese consumers “kind of live on,” he said in May.

“It does everything — sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface,” Musk said in May.

But Would It Have to Have Crypto?

Certainly, Musk has made clear that he wants to incorporate crypto into Twitter. And all of the crypto-friendly and crypto-focused companies like top U.S. exchange Coinbase, stock and crypto trading platform Robinhood, Bakkt, and payments firms PayPal and Block say that it must.

That goes hand in hand with believing that low-cost, real-time capable cryptocurrencies are both the future of payments and stores of value for investors. It also goes with believing that blockchain-based decentralized finance, or DeFi, will disintermediate traditional banks, investment firms and other financial middlemen.

In his Q3 earnings call on Thursday (Nov. 3), Block CEO Jack Dorsey said much the same thing: “Over time, we want to work towards being primary because everything that you need in your financial life you can find within Cash App Card.”

That is, he added, “the goal, that’s what we’re focused on, and I think we have the best strategy to get there.”

Dorsey is a big believer in bitcoin payments, saying at his May investor day event that the first cryptocurrency is the “open standard for global money transmission” and will help Block’s “entire business to move faster globally.”

Crypto, payments and loyalty platform Bakkt CEO Gavin Michael said in May that “we’re past that inflection point of whether a company should have a crypto strategy. Consumers remain very interested in cryptocurrency and other digital assets. And that interest is really not waning.”

Make It Easy

In PYMNTS’ study “The Super App Shift,” convenience and security went hand in hand as the most highly valued benefit of having all of their financial lives in one place.

See also: The Super App Shift: How Consumers Want to Save, Shop and Spend in the Connected Economy

That’s something PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman — who incorporated crypto payments into the firm’s merchant network in March 2021 — focused on in his September 2021 announcement that it had become a super app, saying it would provide “a simplified, secure and personalized experience that builds on our platform of trust and security and removes the complexity of having to manage multiple financial or shopping apps, remember different passwords and track loyalty rewards.”

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