Your platform is just a feature
The future of web3 will be experienced entirely through social platforms.
In the US, we are accustomed to a reality where every experience on a desktop, smartphone, tablet, watch, or TV is accessed through distinct applications either on the device or in the browser. It does not seem unnatural to me that I can’t login to Facebook and pay my bills or that I can’t login to Spotify and send messages to my friends.
Partly the reason for this divided experience is because of incompatible application architectures, but even more so it's because of compliance requirements and incentives. Through laws and regulation, we’ve cleaved Finance and non-Finance in twain, and by royal order decreed: “never the two shall mix”. We’ve also ensured that the only way to achieve outsize scale as a monetizable internet product is through corporatization and rabid IP defense. It’s a peculiar example of Conway’s law, where we’ve succeeded in designing an internet ecosystem that looks more like a fragmented and bitter government bureaucracy than an open-source utopia. We can see in practice what happens when the finance/non-finance membrane is pierced. Meta talked about launching their own cryptocurrency and hinted at running a bank in 2019, regulators the world over responded by immediately and collectively shitting themselves, before then stalling all regulatory progress in the domain for another 3 years.
This isn’t the only way the internet could look, it just happens to be the water that we swim in. The obvious counterpoints to our model are the “super” apps in China where both social and finance co-exist in a single user experience. What is also obvious is that this is the better model of the two for user experience, and in fact, given the great aggregating pressures of the internet, it’s the more natural fit for the digital age. We have chopped up the internet into separate and silo’d applications that barely talk to each other, rely on different sources of truth, and provide only a fraction of the utility that a unified experience could provide.
Turning back to Web3 where the canonical state of the system is shared by all applications and individuals on the network, and financial/non-financial infrastructure alike is ubiquitous and composable, the prior limitations are gone. We can expect that, from a user’s perspective, web3 will look and feel like a different internet, one with a unified user experience. You will chat with your friends about NFTs and then be able to buy them within the same interface without having to change contexts.
Okay, but how can we use this hypothesis to identify a future category winner? When every product can feasibly integrate every other product, how can we possibly forecast which aggregators and platforms will succeed? It seems likely that competition will be tremendous and every product with an interface will be forced through competition to become a platform that aggregates many web3 products under a single UI, or otherwise they must accept a fate of being one of many features on the winners platform. If the future looks anything like this, then I think picking a winner is fairly straightforward. The platforms that dominate web3 will be the ones that achieve the strongest social network effect. Why?
The best platform for NFT discovery, is not Opensea… its Twitter. Every NFT project I’ve ever found, I learned of on Twitter. I don’t want to leave Twitter to buy NFTs, I have to. I don’t want to leave Twitter to join NFT-gated Discord servers, I have to. The reason why I have to is the subject of a future post. Twitter should be the nexus for everything in web3. Where I tweet, chat with friends, join NFT-gated lists, buy, sell, swap NFTs, check my portfolio balance, vote on governance proposals, etc. It’s much more likely that Twitter would integrate these features or even that Discord would integrate these features, than it is that Opensea or any of the financial aggregator products would be able to build a comparable social network effect.
In web3 Social will be the core competency of all platforms, and the single metric that all platforms must compete on. If you can’t capture the conversation, you are not a platform, you’re just waiting to be someone else’s feature.