The Missing Link Between Web2 and Web3: Custody - a16z crypto

Wallet experience: For some, just holding crypto assets may be enough, but many will be drawn to all that web3 offers from various dApps to NFTs and more. A crypto wallet is the passport to web3 and making it clear how to set one up, become familiar with connecting to other services, dealing with transactions and more will be a key experience to ge... See more

Even beyond supporting interoperability, web 3.0 accounts are the likely candidate for navigating the metaverse because they offer wallets, identity, and login functions in one platform. Within this portrait, web 3.0 and, in particular, multi-signature accounts begin to function much more like in-game inventories, which hold not only assets but ide... See more

Web3 identity solutions center around user-centric ownership models. They also prioritize portability, with solutions promising a foundational identity layer that enables inherent information transferability, rather than retroactively fitted portability solutions as in web2.

The narrative of ownership is integral to decentralized financial technology. Traditional online bank accounts represent balances as numbers stored in a centralized database, which can notionally be withdrawn or exchanged for goods and services at any point. As the story goes, this requires placing trust in a banking institution. Blockchain protoco... 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.

Building defensibility is tricky. Because crypto wallets pull data from the blockchain, there is no user lock-in. In a matter of minutes, a user can switch from one wallet provider to another with no loss of data. That means providers have to find other ways to build defensibility. Winning over developers is one.