Image by Cayetano Gil on Unsplash
We tell stories and learn by analogy. A good story maps the abstract to the concrete. For the story to function, it has to fall back to a base of shared understanding.
When learning a new technology, I try to map what I am learning to my mental model of the world. I tell myself how this new technology fits into the stories I know and try to imagine what other stories I would tell once I learn it.
I have been struggling with learning about cryptocurrencies and Web 3.0.
As someone looking to explore the nascent Web 3.0 developer landscape, I keep getting lost in layers, tokens, protocols, DApps, and DAOs. Applications (technically Protocols) like Aave have access to billions of dollars in liquidity but trying to understand how things work leads to a maze of smart contracts, oracles, and tokens interspersed with more familiar words like liquidity, interest, collateral, virtual machines, etc. Like trying to make sense of a world through a fogged-up window.
Besides me being a little slow, I think the reason is that the stories are terrible. There are plenty of grand visions of censorship-resistant platforms, the possibilities of generating life-changing wealth, but these are built on self-referential and confusing foundations. Turtles all the way down.
It is early days and the world of cryptocurrencies is still a frontier. This frontier is being explored by a rag-tag bunch of clever programmers, mathematicians, financial wizards, resourceful scammers, and brazen hustlers.
But in order for a frontier to be settled, you need not just explorers but also settlers willing to uproot their lives to claim their 160 acres. You need developers to build mundane applications that solve mundane, but important problems. You need salespeople who can articulate the value proposition of building on this new frontier. You need good stories.
To stretch this tenuous analogy: we are now in the gold rush, but along with the gold rush you also need good weather and fertile land in order for the Wild West to turn into Sunny California.
Those passionate about the emerging world of cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications need to do a better job in bringing the rest of us plebs along. Otherwise, the gold rush will be over soon and all that will be left is a barren wilderness of abandoned protocols, orphaned DAOs, and blind oracles.
I am hopeful though. The infrastructure of Web 3.0 is still under construction. I hope strong, secure, and performant platforms emerge from the current Cambrian explosion of web technology. I am inspired by the likes of Chris Dixon, Balaji Srinivasan, and others who are bringing Web 3.0 concepts to wider audiences. But will it translate into wider developer adoption and mindshare? Time will tell.