TL;DR
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We have a feeling that most of us will eventually use/interact with blockchain technology, daily – without reeeally being conscious of it.
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This is because blockchain will act as infrastructure in Web3, which means it doesn’t need to be front and center in our daily lives – in fact, it needs to disappear.
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The same way billions of us use the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) every day, and are happily none the wiser.
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(IMAP is the protocol that allows messages to be sent/received on Gmail).
Full Story
So, Jesse Pollak (the head of Coinbase protocols) thinks 8 billion people are going to be using blockchain tech in the next decade.
Big call! That number feels a little optimistic to us – but for the most part, we tend to agree.
We just don’t think (if/when this happens) anyone is going to realize it’s blockchain technology they’re using.
Hold up…how would that work?
How could billions of people use a product, service, or technology without even realizing it? Is that even possible?
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It is
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We’re proof
See, we just realized that we’re heavy users of cloud technology – but haven’t really been conscious of it.
If we had a transcript of our internal monologue, it’d read something like this:
“Cloud tech? Nah. Despite all of the hype at the start of the last decade, it never really found a place in our lives (personally).
Oh wait, I guess we use iCloud – but that’s a default feature on iPhone.
Oh and we use G-drive…and DropBox…and – oh sh*t! We use Amazon Web Services as well. Damn, ok…”
We have a feeling there’s going to eventually be a parallel with this story and blockchain technology.
Where most of us use/interact with blockchain technology, daily – without reeeally being conscious of it.
How’d we cook up this theory? Well…
Of late, we’ve been forcing ourselves to take our ‘blockchain-die-hard’ hats off, and take an objective look at which technologies will define the third generation of the web.
Here’s our guess at what will define this ‘new generation of the internet’ that we all refer to as ‘Web3’:
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Blockchain (as infrastructure)
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AI (powering software and platforms)
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Augmented/Virtual Reality (as a computing medium)
AI and AR/VR are going to be very apparent to us all.
AI will be front and center in much the software we use each day, and AR/VR tech will literally be right in front of our eyes.
But as infrastructure, blockchain doesn’t need to be so apparent – in fact, it needs to disappear.
For example:
We don’t need to know that the ‘collected items’ listed in our gaming profiles are actually NFTs being stored on a crypto wallet, or that the universal usernames we use across social platforms are in fact logged and verified on the blockchain.
That can all exist and function in the background, without us knowing it.
The same way billions of us use the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) every day, and are none the wiser.
(IMAP is the protocol that allows messages to be sent/received on Gmail).
This is all to say:
Billions of users on-chain, in the next decade? Yeah, we can see it.
(But no one else should).
