You Get What You Pay For: Composability Within Web3
Additional protocol features should be utilizable at a given price of blockchain execution. This article discusses composability on a protocol level: the ability for users to opt into extra benefits at greater gas cost.
Everyone gets it. Interacting with a blockchain costs gas. Gas is, in essence, a usage fee.
“Pay to get on a bus, and it’ll get you from A to B.”
Why do you pay the bus? Well, someone needs to cover the bus’s gas, the driver’s fees, and utility tax.
This is also how incentivization works within decentralized networks: I pay the network, I am able to do X things on the network. After all, who else would pay for things I’m trying to do?
And so, we arrive at the current state of the blockchain. People get enraged over high gas fees. Some may even create a transaction, gasp, and reject it — simply because the gas fees were too high. This may or may not include myself.
But a question remains. Why am I paying these gas fees?
No, this isn’t an article about the intricacies of securing a blockchain network. It’s a prompt aiming to describe what and why we actually pay for.
Let’s give an example.
A new NFT has dropped — this time it features not just one monkey in an image, but two of them. There’s twice the incentive, and potentially twice the price movement. We’ve got to ‘ape’ in.
Why did we pay gas fees to mint? Well, we wanted to acquire the NFT. Speculation.
What did we pay gas fees for? We paid for the creation of our Monkey(s). Ownership.
A simple, and yet probably very relatable example.
Now, let’s give a protocol level example.
Let’s say you’re creating an entire NFT collection. This time, you’re the one releasing an NFT project, and you want to provide the most pronounced solution for your users. It’s a collection about cats, by the way.
Your collectors, for example, might want extra utility, or even some sort of assurance of the NFT’s value.
You yourself, might even want extra optionality within your collection, something that a deployed ERC-721 ripped from OpenZeppelin cannot offer.
Back to the topic. You’re deploying code onto a blockchain (yep, that’s a gas cost).
Why are you paying gas? In order to create your NFT collection. Requirement.
What did we pay gas fees for? Only the code we deployed on-chain. Functionality.
Let’s dive into that word functionality, for a second.
What if you missed a functionality. Or — scope change — you realized you had an even better idea you wanted to tack onto your project later.
Guess what? That’s another gas cost. More specifically, it’s an entire re-deployment. A huge gas cost.
Put another way. You got what you paid for. Nothing more, nothing less.
Sometimes, this is great. It’s exactly what you wanted.
But even more times, it isn’t. There’s something extra that could have been added. You forgot about a cool thing that could have been done. You want to transfer ownership of your collection. You want to reset the metadata.
So… what happens when you want that extra functionality?
You pay for it.
But, how do you pay for blockchain composability?
I’m glad you asked. You use a composable protocol. You pay for the features you’ll need.
Let’s take CapsuleNFT as an example — Capsule is a secure, decentralized, infrastructure protocol dedicated to facilitating composability within crypto. It features a completely open API abstractable by any developer, and allows for anyone to create customized, potentially token-storing NFTs, in one transaction.
Rather than digging through developer documentation and hiring a solidity developer to create a blockchain contract for us — we want prime, accessible creation done right. We use CapsuleNFT in order to create a composable, audited NFT collection (with one click).
Forget something? Want any extra feature? Capsule covers it.
Why did we pay gas for Capsule’s solution? It gave us infinite extension. Composability.
What did we pay gas for with Capsule’s solution? An NFT collection with built-in abstractability. Peace of mind.
You really do get what you pay for. Everywhere. On blockchain too.
People should have the ability to opt into extendable solutions. Web3 has an obligation to provide such tools. Users and developers alike should feel peace of mind interacting with immutable pieces of code on-chain.
Why? You pay for more: security, utility, interoperability, community, and ease of use. Just to name five.
Why? Because your NFT collection needed it. Because your users needed it.
This article only touches upon the possibilities of protocol composability, and is just a taste of what Capsule has to offer.
With Capsule’s upcoming release, we’ll be able to further extend protocol composability for all users. Capsule strives to create a simple, yet powerful abstraction for any user transacting within Web3.
Sound interesting?
Join us.
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Check CapsuleNFT out at our website and documentation.
You can always find me, 0xfiftysix on Twitter or in the CapsuleNFT Discord.
