“Have you said everything you needed to say?” Many years back in my career, a friend and former manager knew I was coming to an end in a chapter of my life with where I was working and that I wanted to move on to bigger things. He told me this question to know when it was time.

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

I’ve since applied that question to not only work, but life. As someone in crypto those two things tend to intertwine a lot. As I’m near the end of a major chapter, there’s a few things I have left unsaid that need to be said in the event I may not be able to say it soon.

Fundamentally, the nascent state of web3 is in the nebulous hobbyist phase. What that ultimately means is that like the early days of hobbyist computing, people are deep in the equivalents of hardware manuals, chip spec sheets, and manually configuring timings.

The snakes in this industry wrap these conditions as-is with a bow tie and a whitepaper without substance, cloning another project’s work, making a small tweak, all carrying the same message — “this is the future, invest now”

The hobbyists will ignore them through the winter because they know better and the snakes will starve. But ultimately, the hobbyists too will go away without a new direction, without a spark that ignites the flames that thaw this winter.

So what is the flame that will thaw? It will be the end of decoupled protocols that all narrowly solve for one function and mesh poorly. It will be the end of a focus on ownership and finance. It will be the end of blockchain as the core data structure. It will be an admission.

An admission that the model of read/write/own was fundamentally broken from the start. We’re building the next generation of computers, finance is just an application. It’s read/write/execute, and always has been. So let’s look back at what happened in generations before.

In the early days of semiconductors, computers were built out of piecemeal components, limited to single functions, wired together on a board that inherently met physical limitations of the medium for performance. Enter VLSI. VLSI revolutionized computing, leading to modern ICs.

In the early hobbyist days of computers, people wire wrapped their own boards, and to move into the mainstream, some manufacturers saw an industry in producing standardized boards that consumers didn’t have to fiddle with. But it took a separate innovation to get there.

Thus the VLSI era — the inflection point that changed the industry — cheap, abundant, and fast (for the time) microprocessors. By the end of the 70s, the wire wrapped boards and piles of slow, expensive, flaky chips were polished off-the-shelf microprocessors on PCB.

Right now, in the dead of the crypto winter, there are numerous projects with unique small innovations — with hobbyists using them piecemeal to make their functional stack for their apps — all hand-wired on a breadboard with low bandwidth. Crypto has not had its VLSI moment.

The VLSI moment in crypto will be the end of blockchain. What does the VLSI equivalent look like? How will we know it’s here? That is what I’ve been working on. I believe the future structure is an oblivious hypergraph, in a distributed protocol to maintain shards of it.

A network, not limited to the constricted bandwidth of a blockchain structure, becomes more able to diversify and flexibly adapt the network to each use case, within the network itself, instead of having to build “yet another blockchain” and find a way to securely link them.

Instead of the pattern of storage on Arweave, interactions on Polygon, authentication and settlement on Ethereum, or other combinations, it’s just one network. One truly global computer. But it’s more than that. Producing that innovation is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

The spark, the thaw to the winter isn’t just a network that solves these problems, it’s a network that is easy to use. How do you make that easy? Give people what they know. The future apps that run on this network directly will be services, like AWS.

Developers lift and shift their applications, reaping the benefits of decentralization without having to understand crypto, and users get rewarded by using the apps. It is how you get to billion user scale. It is an inevitability. And very soon, I will be sharing it with you all.

This new crypto winter I expect will be here for long. The freeze will finally send out the snakes in this space, and when it thaws, nothing will look remotely like it has in the decade prior. A lot of people bemoan the market conditions — I couldn’t be happier.