With traditional cloud deployment, software apps are able to auto scale their infrastructure to support increased usage. For startups that achieve product market fit this is critical because it means they can more easily provide their users with a high quality of service without having to physically manage their underlying infrastructure. In other words, a startup’s users are insulated from the physical requirements of running the app as it goes from hundreds to thousands to millions of new users.

A lot of people in the crypto research community are talking about shared building and shared sequencing. I have remaining questions about the importance of both but something I do find cool and related is this new idea of intents. Both Flashbots and Anoma are building platforms to allow users to express their intents for transaction execution in a way that looks very different than vanilla execution on the EVM.

Our friends at Base and Zora have been popularizing the phrase “onchain is the next online”. And I really like it. As a crypto venture investor I spend a lot of time both onchain and online. But I find that I get the most energized when I am both onchain and inperson.

Last year Haseeb wrote a post analogizing blockchains to cities. I really like it as a framework for thinking about blockchains in a multichain world. In this framing, it’s easy to imagine a future of blockchains with local cultures and local economies purpose built based on the infra of each chain and connected by robust bridging infrastructure. But that’s not how I see the world today. Unfortunately I see blockchains with sterile forks or copies of the same core protocols. Chris calls this heterogenous monoculture and I can’t unsee it.

I was recently discussing some properties of nfts with another crypto investor and a lightbulb went off for me: crypto allows certain technologies to enter higher dimensions.