It I have been running an identity-first product build for one month. This is the honest account including the things that did not work.
WHAT I REMOVED AND WHAT REPLACED IT
Email verification service replaced by identity resolver. Time saved per onboarding: 90 seconds for the user. Support tickets related to email verification: reduced to zero. The class of problem "I did not receive the verification email" no longer exists. Password system replaced by wallet authentication. Security posture improved materially. Zero breach surface for password data because no password data exists. One new problem: wallet recovery is the user's responsibility, not ours. Three support tickets in the first month from users who lost wallet access. This is the honest trade-off. Session management replaced by identity session. The session object now contains governance history, DeFi record, and creative mint data. We have used this to personalise the product in ways we could not before. The personalisation improvement is significant.
WHAT BROKE
Existing users had to reconnect their wallets during the migration. Churn was higher than expected for the first week post-migration approximately 8% of monthly active users did not return after the transition. This is the honest cost of migrating an existing user base.
WHAT WAS UNAMBIGUOUSLY WORTH IT
Onboarding completion rate for new users: up 31%. The two-step identity connect versus four-step email flow is categorically better for acquisition.
Engineering time on auth infrastructure: zero. We freed up the equivalent of one engineer's time per month by eliminating the maintenance burden of three separate auth systems. Governance participation in our community product: up 44% post-integration. This was the result I was most sceptical about before the migration. It is the result I am most confident about now.
RECOMMENDATION FOR BUILDERS
Migrate new products first. The migration cost for existing users is real. The improvement for new users is also real. If you are starting a new product, there is no reason to build traditional auth infrastructure integrate identity-as-login from day one and build a better product from the first line of code.
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