Fireside Chat, Interview
Seven Trends in Blockchain Computing (Spring 2019)
- The next wave of blockchain development, likened to the smartphone revolution, is expected to occur within the next 12 to 24 months, driven by upgraded developer experiences and scalability solutions.
- Over the coming 12 to 24 months, "wave three" of blockchain evolution will focus on scale-out architectures, parallelism via sharding, and built-in protocol governance.
- Higher-quality end-user applications are anticipated to emerge roughly 12 months after new layer-one blockchain launches, following an initial phase of developer-focused infrastructure building.
- A massive explosion of creativity and currently unimaginable applications is predicted to occur in the application layer approximately one to two years after the emergence of next-generation platform layers.
- Projects are expected to adopt vertical integration to build full-stack experiences from protocol to user interface to accelerate adoption amidst immature infrastructure.
- Stablecoins are projected to become a critical building block enabling higher-level, abstracted use cases that extend beyond simple crypto payments.
- Approximately 1.5 billion unbanked individuals are expected to adopt digital native currency due to its bearer instrument properties that require no ID or third-party reliance.
- The industry is predicted to shift away from using "Daily Active Users" as a primary metric for financial products, viewing it as an incorrect framework for asset management.
- A combinatorial explosion of innovation is anticipated as developers treat blockchain code as immutable "Lego bricks" that compose reliably without strategic changes from owners.
- Economic incentives and large bug bounties are expected to mitigate bribery and plutocracy attacks on proof-of-stake governance systems, with Tezos and Cosmos cited as early examples.
- A global unified financial and monetary system outside sovereign control is predicted to become a reality through digital scarcity and opt-in participation.
- The transition to WebAssembly (Wasm) as a standard compiler will allow the use of languages like Python and Rust, leveraging 20 years of existing tooling to reduce development time and security risks.
- Systems will evolve to support autonomous, code-based organizations that coordinate capital and operate indefinitely, shifting corporate structures from legal contracts to sovereign internet-based software.
- Markets for incentivized infrastructure are expected to emerge for compute, AI data, and storage, allowing participants to earn payments for providing resources via open protocols.
- Homomorphic encryption is predicted to enable corporations to train machine learning algorithms on user data without accessing plain text, creating new models for data sharing and compensation.
- Digital goods and NFTs are expected to evolve into interoperable assets tradeable between games and usable as economic collateral, transforming gaming communities into investor bases for developers.
- The current "crypto winter" and price downturn are expected to eliminate bad actors and refocus the industry on fundamental technology and innovation.
- The transition from Web2.0 to Web3.0 business models will enable projects to cede control to the community while token value appreciates, reversing the extractive nature of current social networks.
- Cross-blockchain interaction will become possible, allowing smart contracts and tokens on Ethereum to transfer to other blockchains to create a network of heterogeneous shards.
- Secure, coordinated on-chain governance will allow protocols to upgrade themselves without requiring contentious offline "civil wars" or forks.
- The shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake will enable sub-second transaction finality, which is necessary to achieve a modern user experience unattainable with current proof-of-work latency.
- The number of developers building applications on top of protocols is expected to vastly outnumber those building core protocol code, creating a need for new funding structures like protocol-level inflation taxes.
- Many ambitious projects are predicted to launch in the next 12 months, potentially generating less fanfare compared to the hype of previous cycles.
- The ability to execute "code as a legal entity" will allow for the creation of sovereign organizations not bound by specific geographic regions or paper-based legal contracts.