Grab a beer, we're going Bier mode

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1. Apps beget Infrastructure

2. Recent Infra Improvements

3. Bier Mode

The tl;dr of today's post is that I believe the infra side of crypto has had major improvements since the 2020-21 bull market and it's time for new consumer experiments to stress test the tooling.

And I know I know...crypto UX is still mid, normies won't get it, etc. Yes, at a high level I agree with that sentiment and understand we still have a ton of improvements to do for our parents and friends to use the tech. But! I think many folks in the space use poor UX as cope. To me, it feels as though people think once we get all the infrastructure figured out, new users will start running to the gates.

However, the crypto experience that works won't be solved in one go. It's not like we'll wake up on a Tuesday morning and say "okay it's ready, everyone come use this!". Rather, all types of tech grows in cycles and it's time for us to get feedback through new consumer apps to see what infra devs need to focus on next.

Now, why is this the topic of today's post?

On Monday, I came across this piece The myth of the Infrastructure Phase written by Dani Grant & Nick Grossman from the USV team back in 2018.

The core thesis was that "apps inspire infrastructure, then that infrastructure inspires new apps".

As evidence, they went through the history of the early internet and mobile eras and found the apps --> infra --> apps --> infra patterns in both.

What's clear from this diagram is that it was necessary for the back and forth between apps and infra to happen.

"...you can open the door to the next room, but you can’t really skip steps and open the back door from the front porch. It is hard to successfully build infrastructure that is too far ahead of the apps market."

And on Twitter, @pourteaux made a similar comparison with the crypto development cycles:

It's worth noting that this was diagram was made in 2018 and since then we have in fact seen the rise and adoption of the apps he listed. We have DEXes, aggregators, Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, futures trading, etc.

Yesterday, I asked on Warpcast, "for those of you that were active in the space in 2017-18, what were the main infra challenges then? were they mainly solved by 2020-21?"

There were some answers such as gas fees, scalability, etc. that are persistent issues being solved bit by bit even today. But there were also answers that showed me things definitely did look different enough by the 2020-'21 bull run

Wallet connect, auditing tools and companies, dev frameworks, etc. all enabled a new wave of consumer experiences in 2021 that weren't possible (for the most part) in 2017.

It was the experimentation with CryptoKitties, ICOs, etc. that gave insights on what infrastructure needed to be improved in the following years.

Last bull market ('20-'21), the main projects going on were decentralized exchanges, yield farming, onchain loans, NFT marketplaces, 10k pfp collections, Top Shot, DAOs, play-to-earn games, etc. And companies such as Uniswap, Opensea, and Axie Infinity brought a new wave of excitement around what was possible. In fact, enough to bring a few outsiders into the space, have them contribute, and then also stick around to improve the tech.

And though 99% of those projects crashed after prices peaked, the industry collectively learned so much about what needed to change through the craziness of the last bull run. The devs got right to work and we've seen tremendous development in crypto infrastructure since the last price peak in November 2021. Don't believe me? Well, we now have:

• Smart wallets (Coinbase, Privy)

• Embedded wallets & e-mail linking (Privy)

• Transaction bundling (Syndicate Cloud)

• Paying for assets on one chain with funds on another chain (Zora)

• Gas abstraction with EIP-4337 (Pimlico, Matcha)

• Huge gas fee reduction with EIP-4844 (Base)

• Ethereum merge in Sept 2022

• Apple pay to load crypto (Zora App)

• Double tap / hold to mint (Zora, Glimmer, Scoop)

• Tap to pay (USDC) coming soon with new Apple NFC guidelines

• Mint in social feed with Farcaster frames

Right now, in the crypto ecosystem, it feels like we're trying to skip a few doors and go straight to the front porch. It seems to me that there is solid new infra in place for the next wave of consumer apps to get started.

This paragraph from Dani and Nick's post sums up a similar sentiment to what I believe the crypto space is about to enter:

"We are not in an infrastructure phase, but rather in another turn of the apps-infrastructure cycle. And in fact, the history of new technologies shows that apps beget infrastructure, not the other way around. It’s not that first we build all the infrastructure, and once we have the infrastructure we need, we begin to build apps. It’s exactly the opposite."

Another turn of the apps-infrastructure cycle.

We of course have the heavy-lift ones that are cranking along such as Polymarket and Farcaster. But I'm more so talking about the ephemeral apps that catch people's attention with novel and addicting experiences - let's call them the "crypto hooks".

And to be clear, I'm not saying this is an easy task whatsoever, consumer is extremely hard. If it was that simple, I wouldn't be writing and instead would be trying to make the next thing that pops off.

But what gave me the confidence to write this post was a cast I saw last week by @slokh, one of Farcaster's power devs.

I highly recommend clicking on the cast and watching the demo! It was - not even exaggerating - mesmerizing to watch as someone who has been using crypto products for the last 4 years.

Similar to my review of the Zora App from Tuesday's post, it was amazing to see that someone could download the app, sign-in with e-mail, and use apple pay to collect an NFT. All the crypto was abstracted away with the new tooling he mentioned above - no wallet creation, paying gas fees, cryptographic signatures, swapping for ETH, etc.

But the key point I wanted to callout here was "building the account infra such that it can be re-used to spin up new apps/experiences quickly". After reading that, I couldn't get it out of my head! I strongly believe this is the exact approach builders need to be taking as we get started on the next apps cycle.

Around the same time as reading this cast, I also listened to a viral podcast episode by Lenny Rachitsky and Nikita Bier. Nikita, who I'm sure many of you have come across on tech twitter, is known for his ability to growth hack consumer apps to the top of the app store.

In the episode, he talks about how his team built 14 mobile apps before launching TBH (the one that ended up getting sold to Facebook). He talked about the process more as a science, less as product building. But the interesting thing I took away is that it's not possible to guess which ideas will pop off. Even a seasoned app builder like him has no idea..."really a 50-50".

The best thing consumer devs can do is build a framework that allows them to spin up new ideas and test them as fast as possible.

To me, it's clear that Slokh's approach of building a base infra with the new tooling from the last two years is the way to go. Now, he can continuously iterate on new ideas, tweak features, try marketing to different audiences (i.e. teens, movie fanatics, chefs) etc. until one path turns out to be a gold mine.

And also! As much as I love and talk about Farcaster...there's no need to even be dependent on it to try building out these new consumer apps. Some ideas may simply be copied versions of old school app store concepts with a twist and others might be totally unique standalone experiences.

The last thing I wanted to mention before I wrapped up was that reading this post may feel like there's no consumer experimentation going on whatsoever. That's not what I'm trying to say. In fact, this summer, we saw many apps such as Rodeo, MoshiCam, Zora, Scoop, Wildcard, etc. launch but my take here is that most ended up falling under 2-3 categories and were large lift efforts.

I'm pushing for more apps that are simple stupid, quick to test, and for a lack of better words...a Nikita Bier approach to consumer crypto. If anything, playing Flappycaster in the Farcaster mini-app brought me more joy than I would have thought.

"Chris [Dixon] has a board game from the dot com era called Dot Bomb that makes fun of the silly dot coms of the late 1990’s. And what he points out is that all the ‘silly’ ideas of the dot com era are now the billion dollar unicorns. What is now possible several app => infrastructure cycles into the internet made no sense just one or two apps => infrastructure cycles in."

I didn't get a chance to do it for this post, but next week I'm going to take some time and brainstorm the dumbest, silliest, and most bizarre ideas with the TOC community in our chat. It would be so much fun to shoot them out and see if any seem worth building.

If you have any that come to mind, please post them in the TOC channel - I'll gift the best answer 5 USDC directly on Warpcast :)

See you all next week, hope everyone has a great weekend!

- YB