While DeFi, NFTs and the Metaverse form the basis of an exciting new crypto-native internet, crypto/web3 as a going concern (let alone a new technological paradigm) won't be sustained unless it connects with the needs of everyday people and breaks out of its own self-referential niche. Luckily for everyone who has pitched the crypto financial utopia at Thanksgiving, after years of only being the “future of finance,” it seems that crypto is finally starting to see a flourishing of applications focused on consumer-facing, everyday financial applications built with blockchain technology. This rising tide of “noncustodial finance” or NoFi applications are showing the way to an opportunity for crypto mass market adoption hiding in plain sight. Impossible without the innovations in settlement, scaling, smart contracts, wallet infrastructure and DeFi protocols, NoFi apps are building on top of the LEGO blocks laid down by the first few waves of speculative crypto adoption. While there are generously 5 or 10 million people transacting on blockchains every month right now, the addressable market for general financial services is (unironically) in the billions.

As web3 matures, so does its infrastructure and tooling, and one of the most interesting developments lately has been the emergent stack forming around an embedded wallet of one kind or another. Dozens of companies and projects are vying to arm the dapp developers of the world with a seamless onboarding experience with (mostly) non-custodial guarantees. And while I’ve been vocal about the fact that improving the UX of crypto alone won’t solve mass adoption when value risk looms so large, tools which let developers provide a seamless experience on the wallet interaction side of things are absolutely critical for dapp developers to be able to de-risk with the least amount of confounding variables (i.e. the scraggly edges of unpolished web3 UX). The opportunity for what I’ll call the wallet-centric customer experience stack is enormous, and stands as an in-progress category creation moment with an uncertain resolution.

Web3 was facing a serious value crisis prior to the FTX blowup, and the road ahead for the space looks basically the same as it did a week ago. The speculative use cases had already completely run out of steam in terms of bringing in some quasi-normies on the margins even before SBF Leeroy Jenkinsed the crypto space. There are basically no newbies coming into crypto, and most of the ones who had gotten in during this last cycle are sitting crypto out completely now. This current blowup is certain to complicate the regulatory and public relations picture for crypto, but I submit that crypto was already facing a do-or-die proposition: create value outside of speculation for the general public and economy, or likely shrink or collapse over the medium as there is less and less to potentially even speculate on.

From wallets and key management, to on-ramps and gas fees, there is still a lot of deployment to be done before web3 is approachable by normal people. That said, I mostly consider these questions to be largely execution problems running through some known currents like layer 2s and layer 3s, smart contract wallets, MPC, batch transactions, social recovery and sign on etc. Our smartest people are on it, and basically we are on our way to having our Ethereum values cake and eating our web2 user experience cake too. It’s because of this that I find value risk to be a bigger threat to the future of web3 - the risk that these interesting and capable technologies are not really good for much outside of speculation.

Hello web3!