When one billion users are on the blockchain, we may finally have a decentralized alternative to the centralized superpowers that run our world today.
In part 1, I explained the three key challenges on the road to mass adoption, and how to overcome them.
But mass adoption contains a hidden attack vector.
I’m talking about something that has played out many times in the history of computing: one application arrives late to the scene and builds a beautiful new user experience that curates an open but messy world into a tidy and organized environment that everyone can grok and use — then becomes the overlord of that space.
Today’s dominant digital superpowers got their start this way:
- Google made the millions of independently-created web pages findable and useful on a daily basis
- Facebook surfaced the most sharable content from your best friends and millions of publications (or Russian bots)
- Amazon replaced the badly-designed e-commerce shopping carts from the mail order era with one-click checkout and free two-day delivery
In the blockchain world, we should be vigilant against the arrival of this polished application, which will cherry pick the best protocols to co-opt, invest heavily in product design and user research to manipulate human psychology, in an all-out attempt to grow a massive user base. Then that new app will be commoditize the layers beneath as it captures more and more of the total economic value.
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are not immune to these tactics.
Revisiting Aggregation Theory
Ben Thompson of Stratechery wrote a seminal piece back on 2015 on Aggregation Theory, which explained how Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Snapchat, Uber, and Airbnb won market dominance in the centralized world.
Aggregators follow a basic playbook that works as a virtuous cycle:
- Modularize and commodify the supplier base (e.g. web pages, TV shows, movies, car services, or vacation rentals).
- Integrate a special sauce that makes the user experience way better, usually by reducing friction via persistent customer profiles and leveraging data analytics on user preferences, history, geo-location, etc.
- Extract all the attractive profits formerly enjoyed by the incumbents.
- Squeeze the suppliers, because they now can.
If you believe as I do that the current state of user experience of blockchains leave much to be desired, then I argue that the blockchain world is especially vulnerable to an aggregator.
Most of today’s blockchain-based projects are like parts suppliers. The various competing blockchains, hard forks, decentralized protocols, dApps, smart contract platforms, and hosted solutions like fiat exchanges or oracles provide the components of the decentralized Internet, but have not been integrated and aggregated in a way that would make them truly useful for the next batch of users joining the party.
That makes aggregation the biggest opportunity —and biggest threat— to the nascent decentralized world as we know it.
Brace for aggregation
In the centralized internet, aggregation has given us a world of digital superpowers that are virtual monopolies in their respective markets. That’s sad, especially if you remember Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the World Wide Web as a decentralized network of individually-operated web servers.
For those who believe deeply in the ideal of self-sovereign individuals coordinating their lives over a permissionless network, the last thing we want is for the decentralized internet to be ruled by powerful new gatekeepers — each with a 50-page-long Terms of Service and 50,000-person-strong moderation team.
If our goal is to get the blockchain ready for the arrival of one billion users, then we need to replicate the “goodness” that monopolistic aggregators provide for their users every day, while ensuring that the “badness” is kept at bay out by applying proven techniques from the decentralization playbook.
Ensure a Cohesive Experience
You have to give credit to the apps in the billion-user club. They brought immense power into the hands of users by synthesizing the tools people need into a well-integrated bundle that they can master.
To make the decentralized Internet catch on, it is not sufficient to just apply good user experience design to individual dApps. If a user can master one dApp, they want all other dApps to feel just as intuitive.
Instead of offering fragmented experiences, we need to embrace “composability” at the architectural level, so that developers—and if we do it right, end-users— can mix and match the tools they need to accomplish their workflows. We need to visually chain together different applications and data states so that users can see how information and value flows between the networks that they interact with on the blockchain and beyond.
To get one billion users onto the blockchain, while protecting decentralization, we need to rally around a set of reusable design and architecture patterns and invite contributions in an open way.
Resist Recentralization
We can learn from the past and lay a resilient foundation to ensure that a great user experience layer is kept as open as the blockchain protocols behind it.
1. Forkable open-source software
To prevent the recentralization vector of this layer, the code making up the aggregator needs to be 100% open-sourced. This is not an act of charity, but is a deliberate design decision to make sure that the whole stack is sustainable so even if one of the participants leaves the network, all of the integrations, and plugins remain usable by the community. So it survives the crash of an individual, company, or team.
2. Deployable on a range of environments
Making source code available is not enough. A lot of companies, even some of the digital superpowers, like to release a lot of open-source libraries as part of their internal engineering efforts. However, every few of these ambitious open-sourced packages are easily deployable in production by an end-user or even a small development agency.
We need to invest in deployment automation across the full-stack of the decentralized Internet — from protocol clients to user interface components — in such a way the same code can run inside a Slack-like desktop app as well as a scalable web app on the cloud. The recent maturation of containers making flexible deployment models a reality.
3. Coordinated via community governance
Monopolistic aggregators know they can exert their absolute power over their end-users and suppliers. As we introduce a new approach of aggregation without centralization, there’s no reason we can’t empower users to leverage the thoughtful new governance tools bubbling up from the protocol layer to make their digital space safer, fairer, and more worthy of trust.
Promote Fair Distribution of Rewards
We now understand the crypto-economic model for protocols, and are able to attract the brightest minds of our time to work on the next generation decentralized networks.
As we move up the software stack to attack the areas currently occupied by the monopolistic aggregators, we need to stretch our thinking about what economic participation in the experience layer should look like. We know that software makers and digital creators are all itching to jump into the world of blockchain, but like most newbies, they are intimated and confused by the current state of affairs.
To design and build the tools for a billion users, we are going to need more than the few thousand blockchain developers we have today who have committed code to Bitcoin, Ethereum, or major dApps. The world is going to need the next million creators, makers, thinkers, and educators to translate their current web/app/cloud/data/AI skills to craft and popularize the future decentralized experiences, so the next billion users can realize their ambition and achieve their own economic destiny in this future decentralized world.
We have thought a lot about how to design crypto-economics that can fund and sustain the open source development work needed to collaboratively build a decentralized experience layer. I’ll pick up on this in a future medium post. In the meantime, you can start by reading the chapter I wrote on sustainable software from the Cardstack Vision Paper.
Conclusion
The world is beginning to see the true potential of blockchain. For those of us that have been in this field for more than a few years, we know that there are still a number of hard problems to solve. Teams around the world are making progress on the scalability and security fronts; many projects are thinking hard about how to apply blockchain to various industry verticals. I believe there is a need and an opportunity to build a truly open experience layer that will accelerate the efforts of all these teams and bring the next billion users to blockchain ahead of schedule.
We need to fight the incumbents’ network effects with our own network effects. When the crypto community starts working closer together with the wider open-source community, our chances of creating software that can reach and serve a billion users are going trend up. After all, FAMGA open-sourced most of their scaled-up software stack. We just have to use those powerful open-sourced tools to craft cohesive experiences that can win over users’ love and trust.
Aggregation is inevitable. But we can make it work for us. And for the next one billion.
Read More
- Algodiversity: Thoughts on Decentralized Algorithmic Governance by Founding Director Chris Tse
- Growing a Healthy Software Ecosystem by Lead Developer Ed Faulkner
- Building on Blockchain the Right Way
- The Cardstack White Paper
Join our community
To learn more about Cardstack, visit https://cardstack.com.
Join the Cardstack community channel on Telegram at https://t.me/cardstack
Chris Tse (@christse) is a technologist and designer who has been working to humanize blockchain technology since its early days. In 2014 he founded Cardstack, where he leads a team of blockchain architects and open-source contributors to build the experience layer of the decentralized Internet. He is also a co-founder of blockchain companies Monegraph and Dot Blockchain Media, and has more than a decade of experience leading R&D and innovation teams for Fortune 500 companies.
