Web3's Mobile Moment

The biggest obstacle for web3 mobile will be Google and Apple continuing to rent-seek any in-app transactions that happen on mobile-native platforms.

Smartphones represented a new generation of computing. But they also represented a new generation of users: the birth of the casual user, where anybody could be a part.

Mobile was a platform shift — a paradigm shift in how the Internet worked. It increased scale and consumer sophistication, making applications 10x easier to use. Unlike desktop computers, phones were… personal. You could take them anywhere, access them without friction, and do just about anything: make a call, take a photo, find a location, submit ... See more

Today, web3 is largely web-native. There are almost no widely used mobile-native web3 apps. As Packy McCormick writes, “If web3 is going to be as big as the Internet, which has 4.66 billion users, it’s only penetrated less than 1% of the market.” I believe, if we are to get there, we will first see the emergence of mobile-native web3 applications t... See more

Smartphones were inherently social, too, unlike the desktop web. Apps could tap into a smartphone’s address book for a ready-made social graph; they could import photos from a user’s camera roll, or easily grab the user’s coordinates for location-based networking.