While DeFi, NFTs and the Metaverse form the basis of an exciting new crypto-native internet, crypto/web3 as a going concern (let alone a new technological paradigm) won't be sustained unless it connects with the needs of everyday people and breaks out of its own self-referential niche. Luckily for everyone who has pitched the crypto financial utopia at Thanksgiving, after years of only being the “future of finance,” it seems that crypto is finally starting to see a flourishing of applica...

As web3 matures, so does its infrastructure and tooling, and one of the most interesting developments lately has been the emergent stack forming around an embedded wallet of one kind or another. Dozens of companies and projects are vying to arm the dapp developers of the world with a seamless onboarding experience with (mostly) non-custodial guarantees. And while I’ve been vocal about the fact that improving the UX of crypto alone won’t solve mass adoption when value risk looms so large, tool...

Web3 was facing a serious value crisis prior to the FTX blowup, and the road ahead for the space looks basically the same as it did a week ago. The speculative use cases had already completely run out of steam in terms of bringing in some quasi-normies on the margins even before SBF Leeroy Jenkinsed the crypto space. There are basically no newbies coming into crypto, and most of the ones who had gotten in during this last cycle are sitting crypto out completely now. This current blowup is cer...

From wallets and key management, to on-ramps and gas fees, there is still a lot of deployment to be done before web3 is approachable by normal people. That said, I mostly consider these questions to be largely execution problems running through some known currents like layer 2s and layer 3s, smart contract wallets, MPC, batch transactions, social recovery and sign on etc. Our smartest people are on it, and basically we are on our way to having our Ethereum values cake and eating our web2 user...

Hello web3! Now that I’ve got some downtime, I wanted to get back into writing more regularly, and Mirror seems to me to be the best option going forward. I’ll be posting short and longer form thoughts here on web2, web3, web5 and beyond. Maybe some geopolitics and political economy here and there too. First longer post will probably be about how Patreon, Substack and even OnlyFans are sitting ducks to be replaced by a web3 model. Mirror itself may very well play a big role Until then, Ben