Web3 has come a long way, and 2023 has a lot to be excited about. What tools, products, protocols, and real-world use cases are ready today? There are eight exciting things this year, let’s explore with Coincu.
Permanent storage
In AWS, S3 is one of the oldest and most used services. Web3 storage solutions take managed storage a step further by introducing immutability and persistence not available with traditional storage solutions.
That’s why companies like Instagram choose Arweave to build features that other centralized architectures can’t.
With protocol updates on Arweave, such as Bundlr, EXM, and Warp, the barrier to entry for users and developers has been greatly lowered, as there are now high-quality, high-performance applications on Arweave.
Messaging
One of the most exciting new protocols introduced last year was XMTP, a protocol for enabling encrypted and secure messaging.
If your application requires messaging, or maybe you just want to build a new messaging application with some cool new features, Inherited users of all other applications built using XMTP.
No longer do you need to onboard a whole new user base; all users in any app built with XMTP can select your app, log in, and continue their conversations from their other apps.
This is already happening and gaining momentum in the Lens Protocol ecosystem and elsewhere.
This value proposition backed by shared, public, immutable data and infrastructure is the strongest and most underrated thing about Web3 and the reason to build with these tools and technologies.
Account abstraction
Scalability, accessibility, and user experience are the biggest barriers to the adoption of blockchain technology.
Account abstraction helps to directly address two of these challenges (accessibility and user experience) and has quickly become one of the highest-priority features in the protocol roadmap and a hot topic in the blockchain community.
Account abstraction enables the following features:
- Social, email, or any account login
- Gas-free meta transactions
- Batch processing multiple transactions
- Any token as gas payment
- Multi-signature security
- Social recovery, etc.
Protocols like Fuel are being built from the ground up to treat account abstractions as first-class citizens, while EIP4337 allows existing protocols to build account abstractions into EOA-based protocols.
Biconomy has been working on these challenges for many years and provides an easy-to-use SDK and API to start building immediately, and its implementation of account abstraction is based on EIP4337.
With the development of gas-free transactions and increasingly cheaper execution environments, developers and teams can start to think about blockchain infrastructure as they would traditional cloud infrastructure.
They can subsidize transactions, which will remove a huge barrier to entry for the vast majority of people – so that they not only learn to use the right exchange on the right network to exchange the right token, but they can also use it like any other application (Web2 application) same, simple and easy to use the app.
Better abstraction
If you’re a developer, you’ve definitely heard of or probably used Vercel.
Vercel is popular because it offers the best user experience available for building and deploying web applications, and features like Serverless are powerful enough to outshine other cloud and hosting providers.
(Serverless emphasizes an architectural idea and service model, allowing developers to focus on application business logic without having to care about infrastructure.)
Decentralized infrastructures like Arweave and IPFS support some of the same functionality, but they don’t offer exactly the same services as Vercel.
With platforms and services such as Fleek XYZ, Akord, and EXM, developers can build and deploy applications and leverage storage capabilities + serverless capabilities on these protocols without having to deal with tokens, but only with API keys like in the past.
The value proposition is that you inherit all the use cases of traditional infrastructure but with the immutability and eternity of Arweave.
Social graph
As of now, there are approximately 4.9 billion social media users worldwide. It is predicted that there will be 5.85 billion social media users worldwide by 2027.
Social features are in nearly every app we use today.
In the same way that serverless infrastructure and managed services (such as those offered by Twilio and AWS, GCP, etc.) enable developers to quickly build scalable applications without having to manage backend infrastructure, Lens Protocol provides a Web infrastructure for scalable applications.
Instead of building, maintaining, and iterating their own backends and APIs, they can focus on building web or mobile apps while the Lens team continues to iterate and improve the backend infrastructure.
On top of that, when they launched their app on Lens, they inherited hundreds of thousands (and millions in the future) of users and an ecosystem without having to start everything from scratch.
Combining the improved user experiences that are now coming to market with real-world use cases (social and messaging) opens the door to countless opportunities for developers to build unique and high-quality experiences that simply cannot be achieved with centralized technology builds, and importantly, this time not strictly for a financial use case.
Attack resistance
One of the other big challenges to build in this space has to do with sybil attacks and solving sybil attacks.
Several options exist to solve this problem, most notably Gitcoin Passport and Worldcoin.
Gitcoin Passport is the way to take control of your online identity by creating a decentralized record of your credentials. By collecting “stamps” of validation for your identity and online reputation, you can gain access to the most trustworthy Web3 experiences and maximize your ability to benefit from platforms like Gitcoin Grants. The more you verify your identity, the more opportunities you will have to vote and participate across Web3.
Other tools and protocols
Huddle started as a product but has since opened up their protocol to developers as well to build zoom-like experiences.
With Livepeer, a decentralized video infrastructure network, you can create applications that implement video capabilities and live video streaming within your applications.
WeaveDB is a Firestore-style NoSQL database based on Arweave.
Conclusion
There’s a lot more that I haven’t covered, but for someone with limited energy, these are the things you should be excited about this year.
The collapse of the centralized cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the arrest of its creator and former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried (also known as SBF), for fraud brought in a crypto winter that ended in 2022.
This came after other significant occurrences earlier in the year, including the collapse of Terra (Luna), the failure of Voyager and Celsius, and the risk of contagion that affected the whole cryptocurrency market. People began to question the worth of Web3, blockchain technology, and the practical applications of cryptocurrencies in the economy as a result of all these occurrences.
However, we must make a distinction between cryptocurrencies as an asset class that trades on a trading platform like FTX and the underlying blockchain and Web3 technologies. The two are distinct ideas that shouldn’t be mixed up. Trading, particularly in the crypto market, is mostly driven by hysteria, hype, and influencers and little by quality or worth.
2023 is a difficult year, and it is difficult to predict what will happen next, but there has never been a more exciting or appropriate time for builders to enter the field than now.
DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.
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Harold
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