Welcome 👋🏻
I’m Inbae. I’ve joined a blockchain startup at the beginning of 2024 to operate alongside super talented, dedicated builders. Initia Labs (http://initia.xyz) is a seed stage company (as of Q2 2024) working towards the launch of the Initia platform, the futuristic network for interwoven rollups.
Why am I writing this?
Coming from a traditional Web2 background (smartphones, big tech / platform business, VC, corporate), I am still in the process of rapid catch-up to the rest of my team. And unlearning to learn something totally new has been gratifying, but admittedly not the most linear path because there is a learning curve. It’s been taking a small village for me to overcome it, and, I imagine so many of you will run into the same problem as well.
My intention for this series is
- A wisdom/learning sharing for informative purposes to both my acquaintances but also for those who stumble upon this
- A digest of some of the key concepts that I thought would benefit someone with background similar to mine
- An indirect way to hone my own understanding while I blissfully share my enthusiasm in the hopes that it rubs off right
What should you expect?
I aim to provide you with the basic tools for your mind in order to understand what my team has been working on. Thus this series should give you *some* bearing about blockchain in general, *some* idea about where the Web3 world has been progressing towards, and *some* sense in terms of why this project called Initia might have a fighting chance as a late entrant. That’s it.
From where I’m sitting right now, I envision a total of four more Medium posts after this. The next one being the Wikipedia-like scratching the surface on the general matter of blockchain; followed by a deeper, intermediate explanation of few different kinds of blockchains; and probably two separate pieces on why Initia came to be, and what Initia is going to be.
The Pretext
The WWWs — Web1, Web2, and now Web3
By now, the notion and concept of platform business (in the context of tech and Web2) could be assumed to be common knowledge. Anyone could explain that Amazon.com, for example, is a digital marketplace where sellers sell and consumers buy anything and everything. Or that YouTube or TikTok is a digital space where content creators put on their unique creations and viewers can consume them. Instagram for pretty things and people, as well as to sell stuff. This was an inevitable outcome after the power of the Internet, along with computing power in the form of a smartphone or PC, became so readily available to virtually everyone on earth.
The smartphone product category, if you think about it also, is another prime example of a (hardware and software) platform, because an iPhone or Android phone is just more than a talking and texting device. App stores and 1st/3rd party apps not only provide utility, but also interconnects opportunities, resources, talent, thereby creating previously impossible moments or outcomes to happen for all users.
(The Internet, depending on how one looks at it, is also a platform, because it allows various different activities or digital entities to live and thrive by being based on it. Sure, it started as a mere protocol of 0s and 1s being exchanged, but at this point in time, it is so much more than that.)
This information highway facilitated so much, in conjunction to devices like smartphones that democratized information or access to information (& obviously more), as it allowed people to be connected with other people, people with businesses and organizations, and so on. Ungraspable amount of information passed through this digital mega-highway for the past decades and the impact has been pretty much insurmountable compared to other types of technologies that mankind has ever come up with, ever. Some would say it is one of the greatest inventions of all times.
The timeline for the Internet or Web”N”s — Web1.0, Web2, and now Web3 — has been an interesting, self-propagating, unexpected progression into different chapters that ended up posing or accumulating drastically different conditions, rules, and implications apart from one another. It is best summed up by the recent book written by Chris Dixon, a prominent tech investor, called Read Write Own. I urge anyone who is interested in tech to take a swing at it. And you don’t have to be a crypto believer or a Web3 maximalist just yet. The book is in fact intended to be an easy read for the laymen and is Dixon’s attempt at drawing the natural conclusion of why Web3, the way it happened, was inevitable.
If you don’t have time to read this wonderful book, let me give you the briefest summary (so short it may cause you to yearn for a little more. Web1 was a vast open sea with only fisherman’s boats, utterly free to roam. Web2 was feudal kingdoms and fiefdom. Web3 was set out to be an evolving mix of cognizant, idealistic… half-communes, half-republics.
So much has happened in cryptoland… I know
Ever since the first paper came out on the novel way of solving peer-to-peer money transfer network by one mister Satoshi, there has been so much that has happened in the land of blockchain/crypto.
As an ex-many tech native and deeply staked person in the world of computing and technology, I admittedly kept the world of crypto/Web3 at my arm’s length in the past. Back when I was part of an early stage focused venture capital firm, we were fortunate to witness how some of the major Web2~Web3 players of now have come to be, from the sidelines. (And some of the early bets did end up working out, such as the largest crypto exchange of Korea being launched by a then-struggling fintech portfolio company, and so on.) During this phase, there was so much money and gains and also losses that has changed many people’s lives, for the better and for the worse.
Fast forward to now, and I now sit in my seat where the remaining players in the industry have weathered through many ups and downs; four total halvings, rise and fall of many businesses and faces. By the time I was ready to join Initia, the market has gone through its N-th frigid winter, and investors were hesitant to deploy much until the market was to recover from one of the biggest collapses in the Web3 history.
Enter 2024
However, with the Bitcoin ETF coming around, things started turning up at the end of 2023. Public attention started coming around. Web3 startups started announcing closing of larger fundraising rounds. And Initia eventually joined as one of them.
As I carefully observed and witnessed what the industry went through during 2023, I was able to arrive to the following interim conclusions.
- Compared to the hottest bull market, the tail end of the bear market is infinitely a better time to join a project; because true builders are equally and if not more motivated to build better to ride back up the market upturn; and as a newcomer there are playbooks one could learn from, and know which mistakes to avoid; also in terms of career move the optics are more favorable (as one is not necessarily seen as a garden variety moth).
- Even the Web3 natives are starting to recognize that in order for true advancement and the next major milestone (in terms of user adoption, and Web3 truly earning its self-claimed successor to Web2), the industry needs to start showing some foundational improvements for the buzzword to be more than “a vitamin to some”; real problems need to start being solved, real scale needs to happen, and proper groundworks laid for innovation to happen in an accelerative fashion.
- More talent, better organizational/business practices, re-imagined systems and architectures, followed by new injection or capital and other types of resources (inclusive of firepower support coming from the legislative/regulatory side) will be needed, as change and true progress in Web3 cannot be bootstrapped merely from within.
When I first met my team and was explained to the direction and approach for the Initia project, as it is dreamed up to be the forward looking, encompassing platform for potentially thousands of different Web3 apps to come onboard to, I was properly convinced and was excited. The team was an archetypal builder team mentioned in #1, hyper-focused on #2, and exemplifying #3. I couldn’t have asked for more.
So here is my attempt to share my enthusiasm, and why on the highest level what we are building towards makes sense, in the eyes of somebody who have a general enough understanding of tech and platforms. Hopefully by end of this essay it makes more sense to you, regarding not just Initia, but a general sense of what Web3 is, is given as well.
Okay, I think that was enough for one sitting. Next article will be on the super basic stuff on blockchain, and will try to explore very few technical concepts and lingo without burdening you too much.
(Part 2, “some blockchain concepts”, click here)
Please send in any feedback on the article to me@inbae.io. 🙏🏻
Disclaimer
- This article series is not intended as a learning material so you could trade better; and for sure an investment advice of any sort
- Also not targeted for specific audience from any specific country or demographic
- Please keep an eye out for our latest updates on our website, and cool announcements on our official account on X/Twitter, as well as our official Medium blog.
