I’ll admit it, I was skeptical of Web3 for a long time. For someone that didn’t (and still doesn’t) find the currency and finance aspect of crypto that interesting, Web3 and NFTs seemed like just another version of the shitcoin ICO’s from 2017 repackaged with cartoon pictures. “It’s just a slow expensive database” I would say, being someone who has spent most of his career working with database-backed web applications occasionally at massive scale at places like Groupon. I was convinced that this fad would pass us by the same way the “lets make everything NoSQL” fad did in the early 2010’s.

I probably would have completely missed it if I hadn’t come across the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). I’m one of those people that registers a domain name as soon as I get an idea for a new project, and still beat myself up for not registering my name as a .com back when it was available. So when I came across ENS and saw people setting it as their Twitter name, that was the push I needed to dip my toes in and at least stake a claim for my name on the off-chance that there was something more here.

The process of registering the name wasn’t easy for a complete beginner, but working my way through it step by step was what led to my big realization that ultimately pushed me to leave my job at Adobe and start to build in Web3: that the blockchain is a global database that anyone, anywhere can read from or write to. That an ENS name is an NFT and NFTs are just rows in that database. That smart contracts are just programs for interacting with that database. And that all this data will live online for as long as the blockchain they’re on is running.

What we have with the blockchain is so much bigger than just a currency or digital collectibles. It is a new piece of internet infrastructure that we’re still figuring out how to use, and these are just the low hanging fruit of use cases. This is what is keeping me here through this latest downturn and loss of hype.

On the surface, it can look like the only things going on in Web3 and the blockchain are toys or scams, and that sucks. Because if you look just a little bit deeper, you’ll find some incredibly creative, friendly, and energetic people pushing the limits of a brand new technology, and it is hard not to get swept up in the magic. To me, it feels a lot like the early 2010s did for Ruby. It’s still early days, but what we’re seeing are open source proofs of concept that hint at how big of a shift we have coming in how internet connected applications are built and what users expect of them.

My favorite example of this is Everything is Everything by Highley Varlet. Jessi Highet and Mike Varley of Brooklyn spent over a year visiting every bagel shop in New York City, ordered an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese, and put a picture and a review of it on chain. The bagel review data currently is most easily viewed on a site run by them, but there’s nothing stopping someone else from combining it with other on-chain review projects. Remember the guy that ate a slice at every pizza place in Manhattan? What if he had also put his reviews on chain? To me it doesn’t seem like there are too many steps until we could see a completely open-data Yelp competitor.

Now, we’ve had UGC-based review sites like Yelp for a long time now, but the data you’re giving to those sites is owned and controlled by that company. They can decide what data to surface or hide, they can decide who can access the data you share and when, they can run out of money and shut down causing your work to disappear forever, or it might just not be as profitable as other business lines which will lead to people being pulled onto more important ones until it simply fades away out of neglect.

There are so many more examples out there and more are coming online every day as people explore what is possible, but because the data is open and accessible by anybody, it means that the business models of the last decade+ no longer make sense. The competition, and where you can create value is now solely in the user experience around interacting with, creating, and presenting that data, rather than controlling access to the data itself.

This is the core idea behind what we’re building at Sublayer. We’re on a mission to help you actually own and control what you create online, interact with and present your work and data in ways that weren’t easy in the past, and put new data on chain enabling the creation of brand new applications that no one had even thought possible before.

Right now, we’re building a living portfolio to showcase the work you’re already creating and sharing online by connecting to the on-chain and off-chain services you’re using, augmenting your LinkedIn profile with much more than just the companies you’ve worked at. But if we’re successful with our mission, we see the distinction between on-chain and off-chain fading away, and you never needing to worry about whether the newsletter publishing platform you’re using is going to get shut down or the writing platform you’re using deciding to hide your work behind a paywall.

If any of that sounds interesting to you, we’d love to have you check us out! Our first two integrations with Mirror.xyz and Paragraph.xyz just went live this week, and we have many more in the pipeline. In the meantime, if you have any requests, feedback, or just want to say “Hi”, we’d love to hear from you in our Discord!