Author | Packy McCormick

Translation |

Editor | Iris Dong

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Monday! Football is back, fall is here in NYC, and life is good.

This article is better than the average"Not Boring "Make it shorter. Spend the extra 15 minutes enjoying a good cup of coffee, spending time with your family, or going for a walk outside. I'm excited for a richer digital space, but at the cost of a less rich digital space, not good old fashioned IRL (In Real Life) time.

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interface phase

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U.S. House of Representatives Chamber

Others argued that the pre-bombing"confrontational rectangular pattern". British Prime Minister Winston Churchill led the rectangular team. Churchill believed that the layout of the space itself was responsible for the two-party system in Britain. Confrontational design - Conservatives on one side, Labor directly opposite them - makes the debate"vivid and powerful"。image description

British House of Commons Chamber

In his speech on this matter on October 28, 1943, Churchill said a classic sentence:

We shape our buildings; after that, they shape us.

Churchill and his rectangular party won. To this day, members of parliament can switch allegiances only by walking across the hall in full view.

We shape our buildings; after that, they shape us. The spaces we live, work and play shape the way we live, work and play. Of course, Churchill was referring to physical buildings. The most advanced computer at the time was the Colossus, which Alan Turing and his team used to break the Axis codes during World War II. Its interface is a series of switches and dials. Only a few people in the world need it, or know how to operate it.

Increasingly, though, the spaces in which we spend our time are digital.

Each new phase of the Internet -- Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and mobile -- relies on new digital spaces to attract consumers. From text-based to graphical to interactive to mobile applications, new interfaces bring new applications.Each phase is enabled by new infrastructure beneath the surface and adoption driven by applications built on top of it, but each phase also requires new interfaces to enable widespread adoption.

We shape our interfaces; afterward, they shape us.

While web3 applications like NFTs, DAOs, and DeFi are gaining popularity, we are still interacting with web3 through web2 interfaces. If history is a guide,We will need new web3 native interfaces and spaces to bring hundreds of millions of people into this ecosystem.

It's still early days, but there are already hints of what the new interface might be. New digital spaces are popping up on the internet and are developing every day. Wallets like MetaMask, Phantom, and Rainbow are changing how we log in, and what we bring with it when we log in. Web3 worlds like Decentraland, Somnium Space, The Sandbox, and Cyber ​​are reimagining how we experience and interact online. Sure, they're early parts of the Metaverse, but that's not necessarily the work of the Metaverse. This is an article about the evolution of how we interact with and on the internet.

We've spent most of 2021 exploring web3 at Not Boring HQ, hopefully we'll all get a better understanding of what's going on, but it's still hard to feel the potential of web3 in our bones when we're still using the web2 interface Influence.

Today, we'll explore how these new interfaces and spaces are making web3 mainstream:

Application-Infrastructure Loop

A History of an Incomplete Interface Cycle

Web3 interface

to the future

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Application-Infrastructure Loop

A common saying in the Web 3.0 community is that we are in an infrastructure phase, and what should be done now is to build that infrastructure: better base chains, better inter-chain interoperability, better clients, wallets and browser. The rationale is this: first we need tools that make it easy to build and use applications that run on the blockchain, and once we have those tools, then we can start building these applications.

  ——Dani Grant & Nick Grossman, The Myth of the Infrastructure Phase, USV, 2018 

In 2018, Nick Grossman and Dani Grant of Union Square Ventures wrote an article called "The Myth of the Infrastructure Phase". During the crypto winter of 2018, they kept hearing that crypto needs better infrastructure, and once that happens, then people will be able to build those killer apps. But the people who built the infrastructure said they were building the infrastructure, but no one was building applications on it! why? Why is there this disconnect?

Grossman and Grant argue that cryptocurrencies are at another inflection point in the application-infrastructure-cycle than is generally accepted"infrastructure stage"。"They wrote:"The history of new technology shows that applications beget infrastructure,"image description

Source: Nick Grossman and Dani Grant, Union Square Ventures

First, builders build applications, then other builders build infrastructure to support those applications, then that infrastructure supports new applications, which in turn require new supporting infrastructure, and so on. This is how it has historically worked,image description

Source: Nick Grossman and Dani Grant, Union Square Venture

Grant and Grossman's 2018 classic has recently re-entered the spotlight as the explosion of new web3 applications poses challenges:

The gas price is too high!

DAOs coordinate among disjointed tools.

Delayed Eth2 and L2 chaos.

Scams abound.

Speculation rules, and the rich get richer.

Last week, Mike Dudas of Paxos Global and 6th Man Ventures tweeted that the article was very relevant to the current cryptocurrency environment. Kinjal Shah of Blockchain Capital tweeted:"We are in an app frenzy about to enter a major infrastructure phase"。 

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@rchen8 on Dune 

As a result of all these demands, cracks in the infrastructure are showing. The gas fee, the price someone needs to pay an Ethereum miner just to buy or mint an NFT, often straddles the $300+ price range during the heat drop. Currently, builders are deploying new infrastructure to address the problem.

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@eliasimos on Dune 

But while the infrastructure will continue to improve, the bigger challenge now is that we are interacting with web3 products through Web 2.0 interfaces.

bridging"bridging"image description

Opensea 

I'm pretty happy with all of this, but it still makes me uneasy. (That said, 250,000 people have participated in at least one OpenSea Polygon transaction. Maybe I'm an ignorant). The infrastructure is taking shape; and the interfaces need to be updated.

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OpenSea Marketplace 

It's still too early. If web3 is to be as big as the internet with 4.66 billion users, it has penetrated less than 1% of the market in terms of the number of people with MetaMask wallets (just over 10 million). To attract a wider range of early adopters, even"cross the chasm"To the early majority, there is still a lot of work to be done.

In the past few articles, we have discussed some technologies that will accelerate the adoption of web3, and today we will add another concept:

L2 and other layer 1 blockchains, such as Solana, offer faster speeds and lower costs than Ethereum and Bitcoin, feel more like the regular internet, and will bring new developers to the blockchain, They in turn bring in more users.

Businesses will bring their customers into web3 in ways that are more consumer-friendly and familiar, such as letting them purchase NFTs with credit cards, or using social tokens to reward loyalty and encourage certain behaviors, such as attending live events.

More entrepreneurs will choose to build their next thing in web3, and some early stage companies may pivot or figure out how to incorporate things like Tokens and NFTs.

Application-infrastructure loop. In the ongoing application-infrastructure cycle, better applications will lead to better infrastructure, which will lead to better applications, which will lead to better infrastructure.

But, based on at least three major consumer internet paradigm shifts in the past, one ingredient is still missing:first level title  

A History of an Incomplete Interface Cycle

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Source: Wikipedia

Mike Murphy's 2019 Quartz article "from Dial-Up to 5G, a complete guide to logging on to the internet" describes the history from ARPANET to the mobile internet , and gave a brief introduction to the future of 5G. Murphy explained that in the first three decades of the internet, it was still the tool of academia, the military, and some nerdy tinkerers. When I was born in 1987, schools in 25 countries had connected to ARPANET, and the military had forked its own version, MILNET.

In the late 80s and early 90s, businesses and more tech-savvy folks went online (internet relay chat, the predecessor to Slack and Discord, launched in 1988), but it was hard to use. This 1993 video, "Computer Chronicles - The Internet," is an interesting time capsule. It reminds me of the first time I interacted with a computer via floppy disks, clunky keyboards, and blinking command-line interfaces.

https://youtu.be/U_o8gerare0 

In the early 1990s, to use the Internet, you had to know exactly what you were looking for, specifically how to search for it on the command line. In Before the Web: The Internet in 1991, ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan Nichols agrees: "Before the Internet, the Internet was almost entirely a text-based The world of ... If this makes the pre-Internet sound like a place where only techies are welcome, you'd be right, and it is." (Sounds familiar.)

Then, in 1993, Marc Andreessen founded Mosaic at NCSA, then resigned to start his own competitor: Netscape."Before Netscape Navigator, the Internet was an abstract concept used mainly by the military and academia,"Alice Truong wrote in a 2015 Quartz article commemorating the 20th anniversary of Netscape's 1995 IPO,"image description"  

Netscape Navigator in August 1995, source: Quartz

While Internet service providers like AOL, Prodigy, and Earthlink brought people online through portals they controlled, Netscape brought people to the open World Wide Web and ushered in Web 1.0 for the masses. Over the past three decades, there have been improvements in both applications and infrastructure -- better computers, faster dialing, email, IRC, the first websites, and the first web browsers (both developed by Tim Berners-Lee established) -- a small group of technology users used these improvements, but it was Netscape's graphical interface that pulled people into Web 1.0 in droves.Tens of millions of people can live in"read only"Browse static web pages online.

In 1995, when Netscape went public, there were 16 million Internet users worldwide. By 2000, just five years later, there were 361 million Internet users. By the time Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his dorm room in February 2004, there were 745 million people on the Internet. By the end of the second year, there are 1 billion people.

If Web 1.0 is the network"read only"era, then Web 2.0 is its"read and write"era. It has transformed the internet from a static book into a living canvas on which users can express themselves and interact with people around the world in real time. The same application-infrastructure-interface cycle plays out in Web 2.0.

The need for Web 1.0 applications led to the creation of the infrastructure that made Web 2.0 possible. Just around the turn of the new millennium, the internet caught fire. Brian McCullough writes on TED

explain:

Before the bubble burst, telecom companies raised $1.6 trillion on Wall Street and issued $600 billion in bonds, crisscrossing the country with digital infrastructure. These 80.2 million miles of fiber optic cable fully represent 76 percent of the total number of infrastructure digital lines installed in the United States at this point in history and will bring the Internet to maturity.

Fiber-optic cables opened the door to faster, more reliable internet (and allowed people to use phones and the internet at the same time!). In 1999, Apple included WiFi in its laptop for the first time, freeing Internet users from the tethering of Ethernet cables. The infrastructure to power the always-on web is taking shape.

Meanwhile, in terms of apps, Blogger and LiveJournal, founded in 1999, let ordinary users start posting their thoughts on the Internet without learning how to code. Facebook was launched in February 2004 and in September of the same year"wall"image description

Source: flickr

like"like"button. Twitter launched in 2006. Web 2.0 is here to stay.

Although Blogger and MySpace are the embryonic forms of Web 2.0, only a few people write blogs, and MySpace has only reached a peak of more than 100 million users. The real-time, interactive interfaces of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social networks popularized Web 2.0 and pushed it into the chasm. Today, Facebook has more than 2 billion users.

The last major paradigm shift before web3 was mobile.image description

TechCrunch 

A mobile application is a new interface on a new mobile computing platform. It's hard to imagine mobile-first offerings like Uber, Snap, or even Twitter and Facebook succeeding without apps. Even today, accessing any of these products through a mobile web browser is a highly substandard experience. Mass users need new interfaces to adopt new computing platforms.

web3 is next.image description

Source: Wikipedia

Since then, over a trillion dollars worth of value has been created. About 100 million people around the world own BTC. 56 million people use Coinbase. 10 million people have a Metamask wallet. Over the past two years, DeFi and NFTs have seen a huge surge among innovators and some early adopters.More demand from popular applications has spurred infrastructure innovation, with new layer 1, layer 2, and protocols racing to fix problems and improve user experience.

Still, the Web3 experience is complex and confusing to all but the most professional or determined. By pouring money into the protocol itself, web3 has been able to push requirements further ahead of UX than past paradigms, but it's not enough to cross the chasm. In the best case, if you put"bitcoin ownership"(Usually via a centralized exchange or a product like Square) Counting web3 adoption, we are now at MySpace usage levels. At worst, if you consider web3 usage to mean interaction with wallets, we are close to 1995 levels of internet adoption.

The Internet seems to have gone through not only an application-infrastructure cycle, but an application-infrastructure-interface supercycle. After enough iterations of applications and infrastructure justified the early need for a new paradigm, a new interface was needed to bring it across the chasm.

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Web3 interface

First, we shape our interface; then, the interface shapes us.

 Web1.0：Graphical browsers made it easy for ordinary people to surf the Internet and led to"read only"The explosive growth of websites created the prosperity of the Internet.

Web2.0：Interactive live websites make it easy for ordinary people to connect, communicate and create online.

Mobile Internet:Apps make it easy for ordinary people to do anything with their phones. From hailing a car to paying to playing games to working,"has an app"。 

The physical and digital spaces we interact with shape our experiences.

So, what will the breakthrough web3 interface look like? What does it allow people to do?

A paradigm-shifting interface does several things:

Extract complexity

Provide users with easy ways to leverage most of the power of new technologies and assets

Dealing with some of the mess that new technology creates

Create new experiences that were not possible with previous interfaces

Interfaces for web3 need to add order to the beautiful chaos of decentralization and provide tangible and meaningful utility to digital assets.It needs to break the false dichotomy between easy, consumer-friendly access and a robust crypto-native experience. It will need to wrap itself within the applications and infrastructure that has been built so far, hiding complexity beneath the surface and delivering a clean experience. It will need to create a canvas for developers and users themselves to create the next million new applications.

Initially, the web3 experience will be primarily desktop-based. As the infrastructure catches up, I suspect there will be a seamless mix of desktop, mobile, VR, and AR, with a game-like interface persisting and spanning mediums. VR will take share from desktop and AR will take share from mobile as both AR and VR will be able to provide a richer experience and make NFTs feel more"reality"。 

Ultimately, it needs to provide an experience that is so different and superior to what people get from the regular internet that they will want to make the leap, even if it means a little bit of friction.

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wallet first

web3 starts with the wallet.

Wallets are passports and bank accounts. Logging in on web3 means connecting your wallet, and once you're connected, you can spend, trade, and gain access to gated areas. Three of my favorites are MetaMask (for Ethereum browser login), Rainbow (for iOS and search wallets), and Phantom (for Solana browser login). If you don't have one yet, go get one, you're going to need them.

In New Internet Logic, John Palmer of PartyDAO writes that with NFTs:

The Internet is now a place where everyone has an inventory. The existence of programmable, interoperable digital objects will fundamentally change the logic of the Internet.

What does this mean?

When I log into a normal website, the website knows what I've done on that site before. For example, when I log into Amazon, Amazon knows what I've bought on Amazon, which credit cards I've used to make purchases on Amazon, and the address I want Amazon to ship my purchases to. It doesn't know what I have elsewhere. It can only design real experiences for me based on my activity on Amazon.

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Playground 

I've never been to the site before, but as soon as I connect my MetaMask it knows which NFTs I own and puts me in a chat room with other people who own those NFTs. Currently, Discord servers already use Collab.Land to grant access based on whether people hold certain tokens (such as $FWB) or specific NFTs (such as loot bags with sacred items). In these cases, the owner needs to find and visit the community one by one; the interesting thing about Playground is that it does this work for you, creating a community for all NFT holders. This is clearly not the design of the future, but it brings about a subtle and important shift in how we interact with web3. With more new NFTs, DAOS, and tokenized communities popping up every day, discovery will be very important.

In its announcement, Station, one of the web3 projects I'm most interested in, highlighted how difficult it is to navigate web3:

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Source: Station

Station plans to augment one's web3 identity based not just on what you own, like a wallet, but also your contributions and who you interact with."The team wrote:"Everyone will have a profile on Station that brings together their contributions across platforms, their on-chain interactions, the groups they represent, and their closest collaborators. It's not hard to imagine,"Introduction"Another wallet-like building block that can serve as a new web3 interface, taking you where your skills are most needed.

Wallets and archives will play an important role in the web3 interface.It is likely that one of the existing wallets, or a new company like Crucible, will combine multiple wallets and profiles into one decentralized identifier, allowing users to identify their activities, contributions, Take relationships and inventory with you.

While I don't think any solution that prevents users from taking control of their assets in a portable fashion is likely to win in the end, a successful solution will make doing so as easy as possible.

But what will we be accessing with our wallets and files? Where will we carry our assets and on-chain history?

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3D spaces and worlds

One of the things cryptocurrencies are good at is giving physical properties to digital assets.

Cryptocurrencies behave more like cash than bank-mediated digital currencies. They are peer-to-peer, if I send someone 1 ETH, the ETH will flow from my wallet to their wallet.

I believe,

I believe,The interface of web3 will also have more physical characteristics than the Internet we are used to.Before digging into web3, I think the digital world and web3 are two separate concepts that should influence each other. Now,I think the digital world is necessary to unlock the full value of web3, and web3 is necessary to unlock the value of the digital world.

The interface to web3 will be the digital world accessed through wallets.

Video games are a good and obvious comparison. People spend billions of dollars buying virtual items, skins, and dance moves in games, but they can't take those virtual items out of the game world. The interfaces of web3 will be rich, immersive environments where most things are ownable, earnable, and transferable across worlds. The digital world is the only interface where all of this ultimately makes sense, and creating these rich digital worlds, requiring and rewarding ownership and contribution, is how web3 will get the next billion people on board.

As Matthew Ball has eloquently written, in order for the Metaverse to reach its full form, a lot needs to happen in terms of applications and infrastructure, of course many Metaverse-like worlds today are clunky and toy, but there are some early signs that how it will work.

My current favorite is Cyber. Cyber ​​offers NFT owners a 3D gallery in which to showcase their digital art and audio. Collectors don't need to buy land in the virtual world to get started, Cyber ​​provides simple spaces for free, but they also let 3D architects design and sell upgraded spaces for those who want to give their NFT even more amazing homes Used by collectors.

Cyber ​​takes a principled stance on ownership. Everything in the gallery is an NFT. All artwork or statues on the walls, or even the music played in the space, need to be owned and held by the gallery owner's connected wallet. Galleries have better sound, but you can't connect to Spotify, so you'll be incentivized to explore and support NFT-backed music. This gives NFTs a real utility beyond status and patronage. In addition, collectors may host events and performances to monetize their collections, turning them into income-generating assets.

Importantly, while ownership is decentralized - you don't need to give your NFTs to Cyber ​​to display them - discovery is centralized. Cyber's homepage lets visitors explore popular, trending and new galleries directly on the site, rather than having to search people's wallets to view their collections.

You should explore Cyber, or even set up your own gallery to try. Worth checking out includes my friend Richard Kim's gallery with some amazing generative art projects like Ringers, Fidenza, Chromie Squiggles and The Eternal Pump...  

And on the lighter side, the Banana Feast showroom was filled with CyberKongs praying, selling bananas, and breakdancing.

It’s still early days and I expect the experience to be greatly enhanced if I wear VR glasses, but seeing NFTs in their natural environment made me appreciate their potential to preserve value and the importance of owning an NFT that you can be proud of, Show it, and appreciate that they're not just jpegs.

Digging deeper into the Metaverse, there are three digital worlds that seem promising but are waiting for the infrastructure to catch up to unlock the full experience. The Sandbox, Somnium Space, and Decentraland. All three are native digital worlds that allow users to own land parcels as NFTs, build upon them, and create experiences for themselves and others. All three companies have public tokens that can be used as in-game currency and governance tokens (SAND, CUBE, and MANA, respectively). Everyone takes a slightly different approach.

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Decentraland 

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The Sandbox 

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Somnium Space 

I encourage you to roam Somnium Space, Decentraland, and The Sandbox. You might see the potential of these worlds and the challenges that need to be overcome, or something like that, to gain mass adoption. Over the next few years, I suspect a few things will happen where game-like interfaces become web3 interfaces:

Immersive worlds such as Cyber, The Sandbox, Somnium Space, and Decentraland will become richer and easier to navigate.

Unencrypted workplace collaboration companies like Teamflow will make their experiences more immersive and steal share from Zoom and Slack, making more casual users comfortable with the idea of ​​always-on digital spaces.

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Yamaguchi No. 10 Family Office

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A bridge between physical and digital

I'm excited about the Metaverse for all the normal reasons to be excited, and for a simpler reason: For the Metaverse to achieve sustained mass adoption, it needs to be better than the digital experience we already have. If meeting in the Metaverse was worse than meeting in Zoom, people would just keep doing what they knew, meeting in Zoom. No one is forcing anyone to use immersive 3D spaces.

But I also don't think the Metaverse should or will replace physical space and interaction. Richer, more immersive web3 interfaces shouldn't compete with the time we spend outside exploring the physical world with family and friends. Instead, they should compete with the two-dimensional digital experience in which many of us spend most of our time as remote workers and internet citizens. I think ten years from now, going back to the way the internet is today feels a lot like going back to Web 1.0 now.

Rather than replacing physical experience, web3 becomes a bridge between physical and digital experience and gives the physical world the same incentive toolkit that the digital world currently has access to.NFTs can act as a scrapbook of your experiences -- the concerts and races you've been to, the marathons you've run -- and create a more complete view of yourself than currently exists in your MetaMask. NFT collectors and degenerators can also be rock climbers and fiddlers. Rewards programs may be replaced by social tokens that do more than just give you a free coffee on your 13th cup. Your web3 experience will benefit from what the world you frequent knows about you, on-chain, if you're willing to share it.

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to the future

Let me end with an important and obvious caveat: I'm not a designer, nor an engineer, nor even that smart. Over the next few years, more creative and talented people will come up with ideas that blow everything I write into the air, and others will join in and build on those ideas More crazy experiences. This is the beauty of composability and composition. Based on conversations with builders smarter than me, and explorations of new interfaces that have been built so far, here's a snapshot of my best guess at how this phenomenon will develop.

Throughout the history of the internet, new interfaces have unleashed waves of consumer demand. New technology cannot reach its full potential if it is limited by the old interface. That's not to say every web3 site will look like a video game or incorporate 3D design - there are plenty of sites on the internet today that aren't centered around user-generated content and real-time interaction. But I do believe that there is so much complexity beneath the surface of cryptocurrency, and so many idiosyncrasies brought to light, that a 3D, game-like environment is the right level of abstraction for the average user to understand it all.

First, we shape our interfaces; then, they shape us.

Original link: https://www.notboring.co/p/the-interface-phase