PsychedelicDAO’s Wish List for the Internet Computer.
We’re putting forth an initial vision for how we see the IC fitting into web3 and how to get there.
Today we’re outlining Psychedelic’s wish list for the Internet Computer (IC). These items are, in our opinion, imperative to the long-term success of the IC in the greater web3 landscape and should be treated as such.
This blog post is a precursor to our first Psychedelic TownHall that will debut today, Thursday, July 14th at 1pm. If you’re not able to make it, please read on as we lay out our vision for what the Internet Computer is uniquely positioned to be.
Without further ado, in no particular order, here’s our wish list:
1. The Foundation Should Focus Solely on the Protocol Level, and Not the Application Level
One of our biggest critiques is the constant attempts by the DFINITY foundation to build at the application level of the IC.
If you look at any other successful chain, innovation at the app level comes from the community. This is not by accident and for a good reason.
The foundation has an amazing team of cryptographers and engineers, arguably the best in all of web3. Their talent is desperately needed at the protocol level where they can enact valuable features that make the IC unique such as on-chain DNS, on-chain SSL certificate issuance, or the further decentralization of boundary nodes.
Taking chances at the application level on things that may or may not be the right fit for the broader web3 ecosystem is a waste of DFINITY’s engineers’ talent and time, and potentially causes more harm than help to the IC ecosystem.
2. Dom & the Foundation Should Have Less Influence Over the Roadmap, the Community Should Have More
The set of topics for the current IC roadmap was set by the DFINITY foundation with little to no consensus from the community.
This is a big problem and should not be the way things should operate going forward. The current roadmap should instead be re-prioritized by what the community deems best.
Yes, it’s true that the community is able to vote on these proposed roadmap items. However, getting to say yes or no to items on a predetermined list with a set order does not sound much like community involvement in governance to us.
The fact of the matter is that builders, not just in the IC ecosystem, but across the broader web3 ecosystem know best what they want to see out of the IC. For this reason, they should have way more control over the roadmap than they currently do.
3. The Community Needs to Stop Treating the Foundation as Gospel
All this said, we cannot put all the blame solely on the foundation, it takes two to tango.
Another one of our wish list items is for the community to stop having blind faith in the foundation. This faith ultimately creates a feedback loop that has given the foundation power to create their own roadmap and spend too much time at the application level.
We must collectively realize that the foundation is only human — they are capable of putting forth bad ideas that can fail just like any other builder.
It is quite dangerous for the community to have this mindset, especially with the foundation trying to build at the application level. These apps, good or not, begin to gather lock-in without enough scrutiny or questioning.
We have been openly critical of the SNS, for example. In our eyes, the foundation has put a lot of resources into an opinionated version of a beefed up fundraising platform. And the community has for the most part blindly backed it. So, of course Psychedelic is going to build our own governance product, and we hope to have competition from other community members who do so as well.
If the community treats the foundation correctly, the foundation should be enabling more builders to play, test, fail, and eventually succeed at the application level through impactful and unique protocol tooling and features.
The main goal of the foundation should be to provide the sandbox in which the community can reach maximum experimentation.
4. The IC Needs to Focus on What Makes It Uniquely Valuable to Web3, and Double Down on It
We believe that the massive opportunity the IC has is its ability to become the orchestration layer for all of web3.
The IC will still be able to provide storage, and compute, but its competitive advantage will be the ability to make cross chain calls through threshold ECDSA signatures & interact with other APIs natively through outbound http calls.
We can imagine the IC as the AWS of web3. Apps are built, hosted, and served from AWS, but they are also orchestrated through AWS via its ability to make and handle calls to other external APIs. This modular orchestration is a major point of what makes AWS valuable to all major app infrastructure.
Web3 will also undoubtedly have a multi-chain future where users won’t need to worry about the chain they’re interacting with. This is great news for the IC. As the orchestration layer for web3, the IC will allow dApp builders to easily interact with contracts deployed on other chains. All dApps are now hosted, orchestrated, and served to the web through the IC.
However, time is running out. Other major players such as LayerZero understand this and are going after this vision aggressively. At this point it is our race to lose, and we will lose if we don’t double down our focus on critical pieces of infra like on-chain DNS, SSL certs, etc.
This affirms our notion that time spent by the foundation at the application level (ex: SNS, People Parties, Identity) has a large cost on the IC’s change to be a significant player in web3.
In Conclusion
Don’t get us wrong, the IC does have great tech. However, no matter how alien your tech is, people just don’t care if you don’t have the right execution, focus, and marketing.
Take Polygon for example, they’ve been killing it with their execution of zk solutions and are very focused on bringing in major projects like Reddit & Facebook. As a result, they’re winning.
The stakes involved here are very large and should be treated as thus. We would like to see action from the foundation to start listening more to the community, stop any development at the app level, and start to really nail down their focus and communication on what makes the IC unique (its ability to become web3’s orchestration layer).
Psychedelic not only wishes for this vision to come to fruition, but is taking action towards its implementation. We will soon create our own neuron for others to follow and become active in both voting on current proposals and creating our own.
In order to start to become a steward for the community, we’re starting bi-weekly Psychedelic TownHall meetings.
We encourage everyone, including the foundation, to participate in TownHall 01. If you aren’t able to make it, connect with us on Twitter or join our Discord.
