Over the past month and a half, I’ve periodically played around with Bags, a mobile app dedicated towards memecoin trading positioned in a way that is simple for consumers unfamiliar with crypto.
I’m going to focus on the app itself, not the memecoin part. I promise! 😉
I first came across Bags last November when it was just a social media account posting cryptic images and one-liners, and gave them a shoutout back in January. Over the past year, Bags has launched a viral waitlist and teased a mobile app initially slated for a February launch. Although the app release has been delayed several months, the beta app has been out for a few months, and the public launch may happen as soon as this week.
Bags has some notable team members including Finn, co-founder of DeGods and Hunter Isaacson, who has built viral social apps totaling 300+ million downloads. So these guys know a thing or two about virality, communities, and social.
The initial gamified invite campaign tied to X accounts led to 345,000+ signups. That’ll certainly be helpful for the public launch.
You can go here if you’re interested in trying out the beta.
Bags Apps Features
Before digging into the Bags UI and features, what is Bags?
a financial messenger where you can chat with friends, see what they’re buying, and trade together, all-in-one place.
The process of purchasing memecoin space is fragmented, with multiple steps and tools to help traders and degens put all the pieces together:
Telegram for memecoin communities and trading bots
DEX Screener, DEXTools, or Birdeye for charts and trending tokens
Etherdops for wallet tracking
RugCheck to identify scams
And probably many other tools that I’m missing.
Obviously, this is an automatic turnoff for the casual person looking to dabble for the first time. This is who Bags is building for so simplifying trading, chatting, and verifying trades is paramount.
1. Chat
The app currently consists of one big global chat, with an eventual feature that will allow users to create their own group chats. The chat feature is similar to other chat apps, with the ability to reply, tag users (specific users can tag @everyone for announcements), and share memecoins.
Group chats can be public or token-gated, with select examples that have been tested over the past couple of months.
This token-gated mechanic reminds me of friend.tech and keys that users purchase to access a creator’s token-gated chats.
2. Leaderboard
The leaderboard is based on chat activity and in-app trading volume. Higher-ranked users occasionally receive perks such as airdrops with partnered memecoin communities. Whenever a notification pops up announcing partnered drops, the chat lights up like kids screaming for presents on Christmas day. From my understanding, the top 100 users on the leaderboard are eligible for these drops and these parameters may change over time.
As group chats roll out, the leaderboard likely will become a valuable discovery tool as the accounts at the top may have group chats worth joining or trading activity worth following.
3. Notifications
Although trivial, it’s an interesting icon choice with the ⚡️ instead of the 🔔. Possibly because notifications are neverending while something like a ⚡️emotionally suggests you need to act or respond quickly.
This is the hub for catching up on announcements or tags from the various chats a user is in.
4. Cashtags and cards
This feature is the most interesting as it abstracts away much of the complexity from the slew of tools that I listed above. When users share the cashtags of a memecoin, a card appears with summary of the most important metrics: market cap, price, price change, and trading volume.
When a user purchases a memecoin, a similar card appears but with a ‘secured’ visual, along with the amount of the memecoin purchased.
Clicking on these cards leads to different flows:
Clicking on a ‘secured’ card leads to a buy/sell page
Clicking on a card without a purchase leads to a chart page and a timeline of previous buys from Bags users on the app. There’s a CTA to purchase at the bottom of the page.
This is Bags’ approach to addressing the fact that talk is cheap. Making a post claiming that you purchased a token doesn’t provide much trust and there’s no reliable way to verify it. Taking screenshots or providing a link to the transaction is better but not quite it.
Connecting your wallet to your Bags profile that’s connected to your X account creates another layer of trustworthiness, helping put money where that user’s mouth is. We also see variations of this elsewhere, such as product reviews on platforms like Amazon.
This feature certainly isn’t bulletproof, (eg: if a user is buying with one wallet, maybe they’re selling a lot more with another wallet) although it’s better. The other reinforcing factor is the social account integration with X. If the user is an influencer, their reputation is at stake if they make money moves that only benefit themselves.
5. Profiles
User profiles are straightforward, with one twist. Profiles include the user’s connected wallet and their holdings, with the exact amount obfuscated. This gives users more confidence when they are considering subscribing to that user to follow their moves.
6. Quick buy
This feature allows users to view the top 10 trending memecoins and quickly trade them, complementing the scrolling banner at the top of the homepage. I’m not sure where this top 10 is being pulled from, but it has the potential to be modified in different ways based on user preferences.
Do you use bags to hold things like groceries? If so, share or subscribe!
Other interesting features and observations
How does Bags make its own bags?!
Transaction fees of course 😉
What’s notable about these fees is that there’s a direct attribution component. If another Bags user purchases a memecoin card you share, you receive a portion of those transaction fees as a reward.
As an example, when I played around with the app when the Bags team was promoting a $GOD partnered drop for active users, I spammed $GOD cards in the chat. Although I didn’t receive any $GOD, some users purchased $GOD from the cards I sent, so I received a portion of the fees.
Although this isn’t a reliable strategy if you want to make a quick buck in the global channel, this becomes a juicy incentive for creators or influencers in their own groupchats. Additionally, chat owners will be able to share these rewards with their chat members as a way to encourage users to stay in the chat and remain active.
Content embeds
Although Bags is chat first, it seems that you can share other types of content. One example of this that caught my eye was a Spotify song that was shared in the chat. We’ll see what else might be able to be shared in the future.
Embedded wallets
One upcoming feature will be embedded wallets, allowing users to trade with one tap instead of connecting to an external wallet and approving the transactions. It’s possible that embedded wallets will allow Bags to provide more details on a user’s profile such as trade history and historical PnL since it’s a wallet dedicated towards Bags activity.
Does Bags exist outside of crypto?
It does in the form of AfterHour! AfterHour is basically Bags for stocks, founded by a successful WallStreetBets millionaire Kevin Xu. His anecdotes about WallStreetBets posts aren’t that different from those trading memecoins:
When I started my Race to 10 Million subreddit, there was this one dude, I won’t name him, who gained a large following and claimed to have hit the 10 million. But it turned out he was faking it. Someone did a deep dive into how pixels were off in the screenshots of his trades and everything. Along the way, this guy started shilling penny stocks and other disgusting stuff, so the community was pretty upset and felt like they’d been frauded.
I like to think I gained trust with Sir Jack by being consistent. I would post every day, all the numbers would line up, and I didn’t only show the wins. I wanted AfterHour to build on that element of verification and trust, and the way we do it for all users is by connecting anonymous accounts to real financial institutions to verify real trading positions.
AfterHour was founded in April 2022, so the provides an idea of where Bags may be headed after it launches.
Bags certainly isn’t for everyone and some of you may be probably rolling your eyes seeing another consumer product around memecoins and trading.
However, there are a lot of lessons to learn from Bags and their mobile app that has a shot at going viral. Hopefully, some of these mobile app best practices can be applied to other consumer apps looking to grow as well 🙂
See you Thursday!
