What Are Super Apps? A blocmates Guide

There are certain signs that are simply impossible to miss, like the splash of toilet water on your gentleman parts when you’re seated at the White House, or that sixth-sense tingle that tells you a crypto meta is about to pop.

That’s exactly how we feel right now about a not-so-subtle convergence that most seem to be ignoring, distracted by the markets sunbathing naked on the beach for all to see.

If you’re ever asked, “Where is all of this headed?” or wondered why anyone would ever use the fifth iteration of the same product on an obscure L2 with a sketchy raise, then you’re one of us.

This sheer curiosity about the future of this industry is what we are here to discuss. Not because we still don’t know the answer, but because we are sure that if there’s an answer, then it is likely the one that sets the tone of today’s discourse: Super Apps.

To sketch perspective, let’s do some deconstruction.

Before mobile phones became the pocket-sized Swiss Army knives they are today, they were just… phones. You used them to call people. Then came texting, and then the famous Snake game.

Before it all came together, everything else besides calls lived on separate islands: faxes for messages, Game Boys for fun, Kodak cameras for pictures, Microsoft retro applications for everything else.

But slowly, the phone swallowed it all.

Now, while you can still make phone calls with it, it doubles as your camera, wallet, gallery, GPS, personal trainer, and maybe even your therapist. And with AI, it gets even crazier.

You can already see where I’m heading with this.

Crypto today feels like the landline era. Everything's fragmented. To get anything meaningful done, you bounce from one protocol to another, hoping the UX doesn't eat you alive. And worse, half of it is déjà vu. The same idea, rewrapped, redeployed, and re-shilled on another chain.

The good news is that we’re starting to see the early formations of something more consolidated, something that prioritizes experience, something that actually feels like the future.

In the next few paragraphs, we’ll unpack what Super Apps are, explore real-world examples, and examine the biological forces behind their rise.

What are Super Apps?

Within context, a Super App is a one-stop shop for on-chain interaction. An all-in-one platform that wraps and integrates multiple on-chain protocols and infra into a single unified experience.

Super Apps fold the financial, social, entertainment, messaging, identity, and other layers of the on-chain world into a single icon.

For those who’ve been to Southeast Asia (specifically Thailand for the ladyboys), Grab might help you connect the dots a bit faster. It’s like a web2 version of a Super App, where you could do almost everything from within the app.

I’m talking chat, socials, payments, e-hailing, food… literally anything you need to exist. So much so that it should be the first thing you download when you land at the airport of a Southeast Asian country.

Super Apps offer an intuitive and contextual home where the user’s entire crypto life, right from trading, bridging, staking, and messaging, to identity, gaming, and payments, can coexist without needing to hop between tabs like a caffeine-addicted trench warrior.

Why are Super Apps emerging?

To get anything done on-chain, you have to juggle wallets, bridges, explorers, exchanges, frontends, Telegram, memecoin terminals, gas optimizers, AI tools, dashboards, and more. The average experience, whether you are a Solana or Ethereum maxi, is noisy, inefficient, and, frankly, weird.

Ironically, this messy sprawl of crypto is the perfect setup for Super Apps to emerge.  Super Apps solve this messy sprawl by abstracting complexity and centralizing the journey, without giving up on the core ethos of decentralization.

Furthermore, as attention spans get shorter, consolidation becomes inevitable. Super Apps consolidate fragmented touchpoints, creating a cohesive user experience.

Another really good reason why Super Apps are emerging or will emerge as the final piece to crypto’s big UX puzzle is simply because AI, identity, and user experience are three sectors that are colliding in today’s world. These things don’t want to live in silos; instead, they want to orchestrate the user’s experience.

How do Super Apps affect on-chain protocols?

As Super Apps become users' gateways, the protocol layer will increasingly operate behind the scenes. This is because users won’t care if they’re swapping via Uniswap v3 or whatever random constant function market maker is out there.

They’ll care if it works, if it’s cheap, and if it happens in two clicks without them getting wrecked by slippage, gas, or poor token routing.

In practice, this means that some protocols will essentially become infrastructure rather than front-facing products for users to interact with in silos. Protocols will offer services, some of which will be called on-demand by more innovative, more vertically integrated apps within the super app. A good way to envision this is to picture them as APIs.

If this becomes the norm, apps will have to quit fighting for attention and instead optimize for integration. This will also alter how distribution is done, causing protocols to rethink token incentives, yield farming, points, governance, and sheer narrative warfare.

On many levels, value capture will begin to shift as Super Apps become overwhelmingly obvious. From observation, this is already a snowballing occurrence with how aggregators swallow siloed apps and deliver a unique experience.

A vivid example is using DefiLlama Swap (an aggregator) rather than searching for the AMM with the thickest LP for a token. The same can be said for Axiom and other tools that aggregate siloed user experiences and deliver a more unified experience with a tweak for a moat.

These changes will inevitably lead developers to consider specific factors before developing or deploying apps. Factors like clean APIs, good SDKs, predictable outputs, modularity, and interoperability will become important features.

Early signs of Super Apps

The cool thing about Super Apps is that they are far from hypothetical. In fact, they are now here, with the most obvious example being the BaseApp.  

Coinbase’s BaseApp combines a lot of incredible features and apps from the Base ecosystem, crumping them into a single clickable icon.

The app consists of a social feature powered by Farcaster, a single sign-on, identity powered by ENS, payments made possible through BasePAY, yields using Morpho, AI agents such as Giza’s Arma, a chat feature powered by Zora, gamified experience like Dimo, and a ton of other mini apps powered by Farcaster.

Through Mini app integrations, BaseApp as a super App becomes an on-chain App Store, allowing users to access and discover applications, while the entire app experience is powered by other third-party protocols/infra.

Another ecosystem to watch where we see this occurring is in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. Hyperliquid is already being dubbed the house of all finance and is beginning to play this role through its stack, such as builder codes and HIP-3.

With more integration and alignment, it’s a matter of time before we see a unifying experience provided by the Hyperliquid team to consolidate both external apps and ecosystem apps.

It’s important to note that Super Apps or everything apps aren’t limited to network chains. Frontend applications such as wallets can evolve into Super Apps.

Two examples: first, Phantom’s continued development into a one-stop shop for everything on Solana is beginning to take the shape of a Super App.

And secondly, Infinex’s growing suite of products and utilities. These applications can be said to be in the very early stages of transitioning into network-agnostic Super Applications.

The Super App and AI intersection

One of the lowest-hanging fruits with Super Apps, even as they introduce unified frontends for on-chain activity, is their potential to synergize with crypto AI, unlocking a natural logic layer that further enhances the usability of Super Apps.

For Super Apps, the aim is to abstract the fragmented bits of crypto’s UX by consolidating features. When AI is brought into that picture, the possibilities are endless, ultimately enabling a user interface that responds dynamically to user behavior.

This cuts across embedding machine intelligence deep into the user flow or integrating an infrastructure that provides this intelligent experience as an additional layer in the stack.

The result is an automated system that encompasses onboarding, decision-making, and execution while putting the user in charge.

AI-driven Super Apps will have the ability to personalize recommendations, automate task sequences, and dynamically optimize protocol selection based on real-time network conditions and user-defined parameters.

With account abstraction and intent-based architectures gaining traction, users will increasingly interact with their wallets via natural language or preset goals, while AI agents translate those intents into secure, multi-step on-chain transactions.

A few protocols come to mind even as we posit this. It’s only a matter of time before it all comes together.

Concluding thoughts

We truly believe that at the tail end of abstraction and user experience are innovative apps that define unified experiences. These apps can be classified as Super Apps.

And as stablecoin adoption grows and the emphasis on the use of crypto rails for global payments grows louder, new age networks building more adoption-friendly infrastructure with faster TPS and finality benchmarks like Monad, MegaETH, Rise, and others, can redefine themselves and put to rest questions about their necessity by treading the Super App route.

They can do this by enveloping innovative applications in their ecosystem within a single icon, while leveraging their pre-mainnet status and vibrant communities to achieve global distribution.

Gonna wrap this up by saying the possibilities for networks and other frontend apps to become Super Apps or niche Super Apps are indeed endless.

Imagine how easy it would be to embark on a multi-continent adventure without having to rely on multiple censorable applications. Instead, you’re able to access multiple experiences on a mobile-first, intelligent on-chain Super App that simplifies your user experience to a T.