a16z Partner: Beyond Web2, Tokens Are a New Digital Native Primitive
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a16z Partner: Beyond Web2, Tokens Are a New Digital Native Primitive
Tokens give users property rights, the ability to own a part of the internet.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsChris Dixon, partner at a16z, shares his latest perspective, dividing the waves of the internet into two eras: the "skeuomorphic" era—where offline experiences like mail were moved online to become email—and the "native digital" era, where entirely new constructs such as websites emerged uniquely with the internet. Tokens, he argues, are similarly native to the digital world, and most of Web3 today still remains in the skeuomorphic phase.
Full thread below:
1/ Tokens are a new kind of digital primitive, analogous to websites.
2/ Major computing waves typically have two phases: the skeuomorphic era and the native era.
3/ In the skeuomorphic era, design thinking is largely adapted from earlier domains. For example, early web was mostly digitized versions of pre-internet activities like letter writing and mail-order shopping—early websites were mostly read-only.
4/ It took about ten years before technologists seriously explored the idea that websites could be read-write and user-generated. This led to the emergence of native web categories like social networks, crowdfunding, and collaborative productivity apps.
5/ This same pattern repeats in crypto/Web3. There are some great native Web3 products, but overall we’re still in the skeuomorphic era. Many Web3 products are adaptations from older domains.
6/ Popular skeuomorphic Web3 ideas include offline ticketing, supply chain management, and record-keeping for physical assets. These may be good ideas—just like read-only websites were—but they only scratch the surface of Web3.
7/ Much of today’s NFTs are adapted from the offline worlds of art and collectibles. This leads people to believe NFTs are limited to these domains—just as people once thought the web was limited to brochures and magazines.
8/ Tokens—fungible and non-fungible—are best understood as new digital primitives, comparable in flexibility and generality to past digital primitives like websites.
9/ Tokens give users property rights: the ability to own a piece of the internet.
10/ Web2 missed digital property rights. When you use a website (or app), it only lets you borrow or rent things. Imagine if, in the real world, you had to repurchase everything every time you visited a new place—that’s Web2.
11/ Like websites, tokens are digital primitives that can represent almost anything—money, art, photos, music, text, code, in-game items, control rights, access rights, and whatever else people will dream up in the future.
12/ Users now can maintain a persistent inventory of objects in their wallets, carrying them from one app to another. If their items appreciate, users capture that upside. This is very different from Web2, where appreciation is captured mostly by tech companies.
13/ We’re still in the skeuomorphic era of Web3, but we’re beginning to see a new wave of native applications—things that have no prior equivalent and were previously impossible.
14/ For example, building on mechanism design pioneered by DeFi entrepreneurs, a new wave of DAOs is exploring how groups can come together, pool resources, build things, and self-govern.
15/ Composable NFT games like Loot incentivize communities to build entire worlds around a set of NFTs—activities that would be impossible without the ownership and portability enabled by Web3.
16/ Fungible tokens don’t inherently need to be tied to money and finance, just as NFTs don’t inherently need to be tied to art and collectibles.
17/ These are great initial use cases—and may remain important—but tokens are best thought of as a new digital primitive, like websites: the atomic units around which a new internet era is built.
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