There will be no standards in web3

There will be no standards in web3 by Fig

by Fig

The bull market is back, and once again the dominant narratives remain deeply infrastructural: modularity, chain abstraction, DePIN, FHE, intents… The jargon goes on, and so does the endless procession of new infrastructure projects.

For developers this is great news—better stacks for building are coming. For investors looking to get in early on the winner for settlement, data availability, rollup, etc., I’ve got news for you: there will be no standards.

Let’s take a step back to appreciate how different a topology Web3 already has compared to Web2.

Consider Visa and Mastercard. They’re the standards for credit card payments. Their dominance and entrenchment preclude any real competition in the space. Further, their incentives to innovate are minimal. Payments might work well enough for the current state of affairs, but time stops for nobody, and we need solutions for an ever-changing world moving faster than ever.

There’s a new playing field, and Visa and Mastercard can only scramble in vain to keep up. In Web3, solutions are proliferating that are designed to make it easy to move your dApp and enjoy benefits like faster, cheaper settlement or a more capable and comfortable virtual machine and coding language to work in. In Web3, our obsession with infrastructure leads to solutions proliferating that are better-designed than ever for data, value, and information to flow freely all over the world.

If you’re a developer, this is the dream. Open, permissionless networks are uniquely suited to enable applications to mix and match infrastructure solutions and to swap them out as needs change and new technologies emerge. Modularity may be an overused buzzword, but there’s nevertheless enormous value in the paradigm. For the first time ever, the very foundations of the Web may no longer be fixed; market forces will drive constant evolution in these base layers, making the applications built on them increasingly efficient, powerful, and accessible.

If you’re an investor, this necessitates an entirely new approach. Betting on any particular platform or layer to capture the market is Web2 thinking that’s being bucked all the time.

The L1 wars illustrate this perfectly. Ethereum, Solana, and other chains positioned themselves as the end-all-be-all smart contracting platforms, where every Web3 app should be built. Each sported its own virtual machine and had developers coding in unique languages.

These chains wound up becoming their own ecosystems fighting for activity and fragmenting the already small base of developers, application users, and liquidity. In this phase of Web3’s evolution, we began to see the kinds of platform lock-in that have characterized Web2.

Then the market reacted. These fragmentation and silo effects frustrated developers and end users alike. Lest we forget, the fundamental value of blockchains is to facilitate seamless interoperability of ownership, trustworthiness, and transactions among agents, be they humans, organizations, AIs, IOT devices, or chains themselves. The advent of cross-chain communication networks and modularization have steadily been bringing us back to realizing that purpose…and eviscerating the L1 market capture thesis.

The reality is that Web3 enables us to move past the era of static, stagnating internet foundations, making constant innovation in the infrastructural layer the new norm. Interoperability allows app developers to surf between technologies at all layers of the stack without sacrificing access to users, liquidity, and other network effects.

For the tribalistic mind that wants a winning platform and a winning token, this may be a hard pill to swallow. But rest assured, the market will force this investment mindset to shift. In Web3, developers will have their way.