https://www.psl.com/feed-posts/web3-engineer-take
The Web3 ecosystem has been variously described as a collective hallucination, a massive grift, an environmental disaster, a decentralized renaissance, and the future of the Internet.
That’s a lot to live up (and down) to.
Here in the PSL Studio, our veteran engineering team (hi, nice to meet you!) has been building fun new Web3 projects. Along the way, we’ve been taking notes on what we’ve learned, what the underlying technologies do (and do not) enable, and where we see opportunities in the future.
We thought it’d be worthwhile to distill this list of observations and publish them here.
Fair warning: this is a long analysis of the current state of the ecosystem. It is a collection of opinions from a pragmatic builder's perspective. It is focused away from economics and the financial mechanisms of the chains themselves. With so much noise and churn, it’s impossible for us to predict where the cards will land. But, in this post, we promise 50% less frothy rhetoric and 100% fewer Ponzi schemes than you’ll find in a typical Web3 tweetstorm :)
🙃 First, the web is delightfully weird again (yay!)
Web3’s culture is young and vibrant. It’s reminiscent of the earliest days of the web and of many of the things that made the 90s internet fun: small communities, weird new technology, lots of blue-sky experimentation, a sense of cultural motion, the excitement of discovery, and new ways to express oneself.
Design is adventurous again. It’s technotronic; it’s blinged out; it’s brutalist; it’s Space Jam circa 2021. Money is at the center of it all, yet it’s far from templatized, corporate, or sterile. It’s a hip bar in a club that a cooler friend had to tell you about.
Web3 is home to new writing and criticism that feels like the work of whip-smart semiotics majors. Like the web’s earliest days, there’s plenty of lofty hyperbole about crypto’s utopian potential. New social clubs seem as enthusiastic about throwing underground raves in Paris as they are with the market value of their tokens.
Sites are admirably befuddling again. Nobody quite understands what they’re building, let alone how to describe it to you. But if you click enough (and maybe connect with MetaMask), you’re equally likely to end up with confusion as you are with an amusing or revelatory new experience.
Ignoring all the technical details and religious wars about Web3, it’s just plain exciting to watch as the web’s new generation emerges. But… there are some technical details to discuss. All of this new energy is built upon bona fide new technologies. Let’s talk about those first.
⛓ Web3 is inseparable from blockchains and cryptocurrencies
“Web3” is the name given to a suite of peer-to-peer technologies — particularly blockchains and distributed filesystems — that are used to build modern “decentralized apps”, or dApps.
Blockchains are databases built from three parts: