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In the decade since ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood first coined the term “web3,” we’ve seen the promise of a new digital empire come to fruition. Cryptocurrencies have become a pillar of the trillion-dollar global economy; nfts have taken hold in high-stakes art and investment transactions; blockchain-based financial services have gone from novelty to normal.
For all of the above, we can thank the dreamers and developers who took it upon themselves to create solutions that consumers didn't even know they needed. It's no exaggeration to say that their creative determination built our nascent web3 empire; today, the ecosystem nft-web3-games?utm_source=coinspaidmedia&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=number-dapps-users-grew-2023″ target=”_blank” rel=””>encompasses tens of thousands of dApps and a wide variety of defi services.
The question is: will that same creativity succeed in bringing it down as well?
In theory, the Web3 innovation explosion should accelerate user adoption. As offerings multiply and diversify, the ecosystem naturally becomes more intriguing. However, while user adoption has been slow, respectable In recent years, the fees we see today are vastly out of proportion to the apparent value proposition of Web3.
Why? We have a chain fragmentation problem. According to a report According to CoinPaper, over 1,000 different blockchains were already operational as of January 2024. The ethereum ecosystem currently has over 50 L2s, with another 50 expected to come online soon, all competing for users and liquidity.
This fragmentation has an intense impact on the experience. Users often need to manually switch between networks within their wallets or interfaces, which can be confusing and lead to frustrating (or even costly) errors. The proliferation of L2, L2, and L3 chains forces users to keep their assets on hand and gas tokens in their wallets if they want to try out emerging applications built on those chains. And when they do, they face a learning curve: each blockchain poses its own set of rules, transaction fees, and functionalities.
Given these challenges, is it any wonder that consumers at large have been hesitant to make the jump to Web3? To achieve widespread adoption by consumers at large, we need to deliver more seamless and intuitive user experiences.
The intuitive answer would seem to be to encourage developers to improve cross-chain compatibility and interoperability. However, relying on individual developers to provide global interoperability is a bit like asking someone to empty the ocean with a bucket: the scale of the challenge makes the request ridiculous.
Today, the web3 ecosystem boasts a thousand active blockchains; we could see ten times as many in five years. Blockchains are proliferating at an exponential rate as innovators build chains that fit particular industries, interests, or business use cases, and given the early success and adoption of blockchain modularity, thesisThis fragmentation is likely to intensify.
But even if chain proliferation were one-tenth of the current rate, developers would never be able to keep up. Unlike Web2, where innovators can build a single application and attract users from across the internet with few limitations, Web3 developers typically need to deploy instances of their applications on multiple chains to find users and liquidity. As a result, developers need to spend their time building insecure, inefficient, and inelegant cross-chain messaging solutions instead of improving their core value proposition.
To return to our empire metaphor: instead of expanding the reach and resources of the web3, architects and builders are reduced to papering over cracks and digging connecting tunnels between sections of the city, exhausting themselves with work that most inhabitants will never see or appreciate.
So how can we alleviate Web3's user experience problems and give developers more time for value-adding innovation? The answer lies in chain abstraction.
Imagine a world where our sharded chains were abstracted away. Developers could create a single instance of their app on the chain of their choice and attract users from any chain seamlessly and seamlessly; users wouldn’t have to know which chain the app was built on or worry about whether their assets and gas tokens are compatible.
To build this functionally abstract ecosystem, Web3 developers would need to meet several requirements. First, user balances would need to be unified, aggregated, and accounted for across all chains to ensure that users could freely spend their balances without hassle, while avoiding intentional or accidental overdrafts. Furthermore, developers should not need to build complex integrations into their solutions to facilitate cross-chain accessibility.
Like Rome, an abstract Web3 empire won’t be built in a day, but there’s no question that we need to start building it today. Unless there’s an ecosystem-wide effort to prioritize abstraction, we won’t have a chance to unlock mainstream adoption. It’s our duty to the Web3 architects and innovators to ensure that their visionary work receives the recognition, acknowledgement, and utilization it deserves.
