受 P 老板邀请，今天给 Google 的高管讲了一下 Web3 的基本概念。因为我也不是 Web3 native，带着沉重的 Web2 烙印，抱着更担心 Q&A 环节的心情，诚惶诚恐的给老板们讲了讲一些基础知识。公众号也分享出来，做到一瓜多吃 ～ 因为这个分享的主旨是给 Web2 钉子户普及概念，还请含“3”率高的小伙伴自动跳过，不要浪费时间。
Before the main content, I would like to give a quick overview of what Web3 is. This term got popular last year when a16z's founder Andreessen Horowitz flew to Washington to lobby congress about the idea as a potential solution to questions about the regulation of the blockchain. He defined web3 as a group of technologies encompassing blockchain, cryptographic protocols, digital assets, decentralized finance, and social platforms.
In today's content, I will give an overview of the web3 industry and some philosophy about blockchain.
Let's begin with the Infrastructure, which is the foundation of blockchain.
This picture is a landscape of all the layers.
The basic is Layer 0 with a P2P layer and virtual machine.
And for Layer 1, there are public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum and other protocols like IPFS.
Layer 2, also recently trendy, has many roll-ups, plasma protocols, and side-chains. For example, Axie Infinity built a side-chain called Ronin to reduce transaction costs and increase transaction speeds.
And above that, we have APIs and developer languages. For example, Solidity is the programming language to write contracts on EVM.
Let's take a look at Polygon as a case study of Infrastructure. In a word, Polygon is a scaling platform for Ethereum. It began in India 5 years ago and currently has a $13 billion valuation. Polygon positions itself as the AWS of Web3 and expands the plasma technology to other solutions like ZK and Optimistic roll-ups.
You can see the history of Polygon, which grew very fast. Now with over 7,000 decentralized applications or dApps running on its network as of last year, especially for GameFi and NFTs, they enjoy Polygon because of the cheaper transaction fees.
If we look at the blockchain infrastructure as a whole picture, I want to give some highlights and challenges.
First, more intelligent people and smart money are entering the industry. The developer ecosystem is also snowballing, with more than 20 thousand active monthly developers on Github. And most recently, star projects such as Sui and Aptos have valuations of over $2B within only a few months. And also, for POS, there is a lot of progress on POS, which is eco-friendly and more efficient. Beyond that, ZK also has more improvement with privacy and scalability.
However, there are still lots of issues to be solved for blockchain, especially for Infrastructure. Cost is high; speed is low. Security and privacy are not guaranteed, and there is no uniform standard among different chains and different protocols. It is hard to support a killer app or extensive user base nowadays and hard to break the circle to bring more users only leveraging current infrastructures.
Next, let's move to Decentralized Finance or DeFi.
Here is an example of Ethereum's DeFi landscape. DeFi has all the same mappings as CeFi, for example, payments, stablecoins, lending, insurance, options, and exchanges.
Take Uniswap, for example. Binance, Coinbase, and Crypto.com are centralized exchanges, short for CEX. Uniswap, Pancakeswap, and Curve are decentralized exchanges or DEX. Unlike CEX, Uniswap is a protocol of AMM; Automated market makers incentivize users to become liquidity providers in exchange for a share of transaction fees and free tokens. They have a humble beginning, receiving a small check of $50 thousand from the Ethereum Foundation, to now being a $10B market cap company with a $6B total value locked on its protocol and trading volume of $1.1 trillion.
Back to the Defi industry, we can see lots of improvements and also some problems as well.
Defi began to become very popular last summer (2021), so we call it Defi summer, and it reached nearly $200B in total value locked until Oct 2021.
Recently, many large Cefi platforms were overleveraged and faced liquidity issues, leading to bankruptcy, including companies such as Babel, Voyager, Celsius, BlockFi, and Three Arrow Capital. Users thought their funds were safe, but ultimately they had no control over how platforms used their funds. But in the case of Defi, code is law, and there is less room for a person or centralized entity to make decisions on behalf of users.
But again, Defi has its problems. Protocols have bugs and vulnerabilities, and hackers can exploit these. For example, Dai, a stablecoin, during the 312 event in 2020, ETH dropped fast within a short time on March 12th in 2020, hackers can purchase DAI at the price of $0 by paying higher transaction fees. And last week, there was a nomad bridge bug, and $190 million was stolen in a few hours. In the blockchain industry, code is law. If there is a bug in the code, there is potential for hackers to break into the protocol.
Another voice of doubt is whether Defi is decentralized. For example, Solend, a lending platform on a layer1 blockchain Solana, was initiating a vote to decide how to deal with the most significant whale account on Solend and vote again to deny the last poll and vote again to ban the deny result. Even though the protocol is decentralized, the governance is still centralized.
Beyond that, when token prices dropped, the DeFi industry dropped even more quickly since they used leverage. From the high point of $200B down to $60B during the recent downturn.
Also, there are concerns about inflated TVLs, since TVL is one of the core metrics used in Defi. This is done by stacking protocols on top of one another; thus, user deposits are counted multiple times.
And finally, wash trading is prevalent, especially on chains with low transaction fees. This can skew volume to make it seem like many people are using a protocol when in reality, many transactions are fake.
Ok, let's move to the more consumer-facing part. GameFi.
There are tons of game developers launching web3/blockchain game divisions and crypto funds from Animoca's Sandbox to Sorare, Axie, and blockchain games across metaverse, MMO, TCG, RPG, and other categories.
Take StepN, for example. It debuted last year in October by winning the Solana hackathon. The founders are based in Australia. They are a move-to-earn fitness web3 app, allowing you to earn crypto while exercising, iterating on the play-to-earn concept made famous by Axie Infinity. They reached $3 to $5 million daily net profit at their peak, with a market cap of $5B within one year.
For blockchain games, we can see that compared to Web2 games, users can own the assets they gained from the game and use their single wallet to log in to multiple games.
Also, blockchain games can create a new type of global (virtual) commerce. There is an inherent monetary aspect of blockchain games. However, the value of a currency unit is different across the world. For example, a dollar in the US buys much less than a dollar in the Philippines. In this case, there is a kind of arbitrage where someone in the Philippines is willing to spend an hour grinding to make a dollar playing a game, while someone in the US is willing to pay a dollar to skip that same hour of grinding.
But still, current games can not escape the death spiral that happens when game tokens begin to drop in price, as people think the participants are speculators and not real gamers. In the case of Axie, they were first hit by a hack of their Ronin side-chain, which caused a loss of trust in their ecosystem, and as the price began declining, it eventually led to a death spiral.
And going back to the actual value of a game, do they exist for people to have fun or to help people earn money? Many insist games are more for entertainment than making money, so do blockchain games take away from the fun aspect of games?
And finally, the blockchain infrastructure is still in a rudimentary state. Transactions are slow and expensive. The Infrastructure will need to improve to allow for more dynamic and engaging games for users. This is similar to how in web2, the introduction of 3G, 4G, and 5G each brought about new industries and business models.
For NFT, I will go through it quickly as I saw William already delivered a session on NFT this March.
NFT has many different use cases. For example, they can be used for identity verification for DAO and guilds, inventory items inside Games, on-chain copies of artwork, passes for supporting influencers, deposit certificates for value locked in DeFi protocol, and on-chain mappings of physical assets like properties.
I used BAYC for a case study. We may all be familiar with the Bored Ape, one of the most popular NFTs developed by BAYC. They just closed their seed round investment led by a16z and Sequoia with a valuation of $4B this past Mar. They aim to reach half-billion revenue and almost half-billion net income this year, which is fantastic as the Company was only founded one year ago. They are now developing games like Metaverse Otherside; they acquired other NFT projects like CryptoPunks and hosted a successful event during NFT New York, exclusive to people who own their NFT. And they also sell streetwear with a very high brand premium. I have a friend who just sent me a sweatshirt; She purchased the hoodie at a very high price of $120, of which now the second-hand market price is almost $300. But I have to say that hunger marketing is excellent. Only people with the NFT can purchase at the max of one item.
NFT brings lots of imagination to the industry, and nowadays, they help blockchain become mainstream by bringing more non-technical people into the industry. But still, some people don't believe in NFT, a jpeg worth hundreds of thousands of dollars without owning the actual copyright. And last year, when many influencers were shouting about NFTs, many of their fans and followers purchased. But they are not real investors, and many young kids and poor people lost money when Ethereum and the NFT price dropped recently.
Last but not least, I want to give some examples for web3 protocol, which is trying to find a replacement for web2 companies.
From AWS, S3, we have Filcoin as IPFS, a web3 storage solution. Then we have Spotify in the web2 world, while Audius in web3 wants to make a decentralized music platform; Mirror also intends to replace medium and use the token economy to rebuild the creator ecosystem.
I will use ENS as an example. At the beginning of websites, we used IP addresses to direct us to a website, but then we have domain names and .com for easier use and memory. In the same methodology, ENS, which is short for Ethereum Name Services, wants to use a domain-like name such as renee.eth to direct to my Ethereum wallet address. They already achieved 8 million in monthly revenue this May, and over 1.3 million names have already been registered.
These ideas from web2 companies to web3 protocols bring more innovations and solve problems, especially for early adopters and stakeholders' benefit. For example, when Facebook grew bigger and bigger most early employees and investors became millionaires, but what about the early users of Facebook? They didn't receive any rewards or bonuses when the platform grew bigger and bigger. Like Spotify, the platform and Record labels enjoy higher valuations and revenues, but most singers receive only a tiny piece of the pie. All those web3 tokenoimic designs want to resolve this question.
However, with these web2 mapping projects, people feel like they are still in a Skeuomorph stage. Skeuomorph is a word first used by Steve Jobs for the concept of a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures necessary for the original. Just like the first version of Electric light bulbs imitates the shape of candle flames, they will eventually have their style.
But if we look at the internet, there is no online version of every offline thing. E-Commerce is not an online version of Walmart but Amazon; Same as Web3, I believe there will be more native projects that only originate from blockchain, and it will have a different mindset and brand new form.
Why I think Web3 will be different from Web2. We will have to talk about the methodology of web3.
If LLC (limited liability company) is one of the most significant innovations of our time in business, then DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) as a new business structure would be the most critical driver to creating more business giants.
The above is Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase's study of internal and external transaction costs. Because of all the on-chain technology and open-source protocol, external transaction costs will be much lower than traditional businesses relying on person-to-person trust and legal protections. For example, you can consider all the BTC miners as an example of a DAO organization. Even though the miners do not know one another, they trust the bitcoin code and know that once their machines solve the complicated math problem based on the cryptographic hash algorithm, they will earn BTC as a reward.
And aside from DAOs, I would also like to recommend a book, the Sovereign Individual.
The rise of Bitcoin represents the rise of the sovereign individual. Three forces will play against each other - the individual, data, and government. We will see how this eventually plays out.
Snow Crash and Sovereign Individual were published around the same period, 1992 and 1997, but with many similar concepts of what the future world would look like. After reading both two books, we may have a better understanding of Web3.
Then let me summarize some web3 study materials; you can find more information through those websites.
Thank you for your attention. At the end of today's sharing, I would like to say that it is the best possible time to be alive because almost everything I thought I knew is wrong. Web3 is changing rapidly, and I may be wrong with most of my understanding. But we are very open in this industry and believe in the future of web3. The end will likely differ from today's, but we're excited to see where it goes.