The Interface Phase

This isn’t a knock on OpenSea. OpenSea is killing it, and I’m a big fan. It just crossed 400k total traders all-time. It’s made it possible for a large number of early adopters to buy and trade NFTs. But it still looks and behaves like a web2 product, as most web3 products do. People upload content, other people can interact with and transact that ... See more

“Before Netscape Navigator, the internet was an abstract concept, used primarily by the military and academia,” wrote Alice Truong in a 2015 Quartz piece commemorating 20 years since Netscape’s 1995 IPO, “but Netscape’s graphical interface made the web accessible to everyday people.”

First, builders build apps, then other builders build the infrastructure to support those apps, then that infrastructure supports new apps, which in turn requires new supporting infrastructure, and so on. That’s how it worked historically, from the lightbulb to the airplane to the iPhone, and it’s exactly what was happening in web3.

Instead of the commonly-accepted “infrastructure phase,” Grossman and Grant argued, crypto was in another turn of the apps-infrastructure-cycle. “The history of new technologies shows that apps beget infrastructure,” they wrote, “not the other way around.”

First, we shape our interfaces; thereafter, they shape us.

In 1995, when Netscape went public, there were 16 million internet users in the entire world. By 2000, just five years later, there were 361 million internet users. By the time Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in his dorm room in February 2004, there were 745 million people on the internet. By the end of the next year, there were a billion.

New technologies can’t live up to their full potential when confined by old interfaces. That’s not to say that every web3 website will look like a video game or incorporate 3D design -- there are plenty of websites on the internet today that aren’t centered around user-generated content and real-time interaction. But I do believe that there’s so mu... See more

But I also don’t think the Metaverse should or will replace physical spaces and interactions. Richer, more immersive web3 interfaces, shouldn’t compete with the time we spend outside, with family and friends, exploring the physical world. Instead, they should compete with the 2D digital experiences in which so many of us spend most of our lives as ... See more

Wallets and Profiles will serve an important role in the web3 interface. It’s likely that one of the existing wallets, or a new company like Crucible, will roll up multiple wallets and Profiles into one Decentralized Identifier that lets a user bring his or her activity, contributions, relationships, and inventory from across chains with them where... See more