The Interface Phase

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.

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.”

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

While web3 apps like NFTs, DAOs, and DeFi are gaining popularity, we’re still interacting with web3 through web2 interfaces. If history is a guide, we’re going to need new web3-native interfaces and spaces to bring hundreds of millions of people into the ecosystem.

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

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

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

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.

“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.”