The Interface Phase

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

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

The web3 interface will need to add order to the beautiful chaos of decentralization, and give obvious and meaningful utility to digital assets. It will need to break the false dichotomy between easy, consumer-friendly on-ramps and a powerful crypto-native experience.

That said, the web3 experience still remains complex and confusing to all but the most technical or committed. By baking money into the protocols themselves, web3 has been able to bootstrap demand further ahead of user experience than the paradigms of the past, but that won’t be enough to cross the chasm.

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.

“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.”

To use the internet in the early 1990s, you really had to know exactly what you were looking for and specifically how to search for it in the command line. In Before the Web: The Internet in 1991, ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan Nichols agreed:“The pre-Web Internet was an almost entirely text-based world...If this makes the pre-Web sound like a place tha... See more