Crypto is in a weird spot.
The last two cycles were triggered by amazing innovation and excitement from ICOs, defi and NFTs.
This cycle doesn’t seem to have anything similar.
Just … memecoins.
But under the surface I think we are getting close to crypto’s biggest promise so far:
Composability.
It’s not as viral and there’s no immediate speculation … but it's a much bigger transformation of our digital spaces ... and it’s quietly exploding in 2024.
WTF is composability?
This word gets thrown around a lot in crypto but it’s basically legos.
Apps can build on top of one another on some type of shared, open foundation.
Data, identity and money flows freely between the apps instead of walled gardens.
It’s been working in defi for years but now we’re starting to see glimpses in consumer products.
Like what?
Lens Protocol was the first lightbulb moment for me last year.
You hop between different social apps on Lens and your followers go with you.
It’s so much better - just connect a wallet to a new app on the Lens network, and your followers and social activity are already there.
Imagine opening up YouTube and all your TikTok followers are also following you.
An explosion of composability
More and more examples are growing.
On Farcaster you can order e-commerce products without leaving the social feed.
I can connect to a brand new social app like Drakula or Sonata, and my Farcaster audience is already following me.
Builders can create new apps on top of these social graphs. They get instant distribution and cut out the cold-start problem, with the confidence they can't be rugged.
Then there’s Zora — dozens of apps are now built on top of Zora (40% of mints happen outside the Zora website).
And Solana just launched “Blinks” enabling you to make onchain transactions in a pop-up window on websites and web2 social feeds.
This flips the entire Internet model
In the future we will no longer sign up to hundreds of different websites, re-enter the same profile information and credit card details, and build a new audience from zero.
We will simply …
Connect a wallet.
Jesse Walden calls this “headless marketplaces.”
We’ve also written about it as “data backpacks.”
The user becomes the central point and takes their identity and social graph with them from product-to-product.
Meanwhile apps are more fluid and “go where the wallets are.”
Fundamentally better UX
This is a fundamentally better experience than what exists today.
And in my opinion this is what “mass adoption” looks like (quiet composability, not hyper-financialization of everything).
Obviously we’re a long way out … but those lightbulb moments are happening more and more often.
A new lightbulb moment is coming…
We’re working hard to bring you another lightbulb moment like this in music very soon.
In a few weeks we’ll launch a second app on Oscillator, seamlessly integrating with our first app (Poke) to show you what music apps could look like if they worked on composable rails.
Stay tuned.
If you want to be the first to try it out, jump into our Telegram group.
