a16z partner Chris Dixon: Blockchain is the app store of the new era

Source: Chris Dixon Twitter

Compiled by: Chain Catcher

If you were an ambitious, adventurous founder during the mobile gold rush around 2009-12, you developed a new mobile application. That was the time when Uber, WhatsApp, Instagram, Venmo, Snapchat, and many other top apps were born.
Since then, the adoption rate of mobile technology has followed an S-curve. Great mobile applications will still be built, but the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. The frontier of computing in this decade is building applications on programmable blockchains like Ethereum.
Blockchains are virtual computers that run on a network of physical computers. They have new properties and functionalities that previous types of computers did not possess.
When a blockchain has a highly expressive, Turing-complete programming language, we say that the blockchain is programmable. The most popular programmable blockchain is Ethereum.
We saw this during last year's "DeFi Summer," as the first wave of crypto/blockchain killer applications exploded: Uniswap, Aave, Compound, Maker, and others.
DeFi shows that it is possible to build inclusive, fair, transparent, and composable financial services. On Wall Street, value flows to centralized institutions. In DeFi, value flows outward to the edges.
This year, NFTs and gaming are the next wave of explosive blockchain applications: NBA Top Shot, CryptoPunks, Axie Infinity, and others. You can see this reflected in the rapid growth of total sales on the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea:

For some, NFTs may seem frivolous, like toys. But NFTs are important because they provide better economic incentives for creators and developers compared to existing Web 2 platforms.
What will the next wave of blockchain killer applications be? The computer wave is hard to predict, but there are some interesting emerging categories.
DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are internet-native global collectives that share resources, build products, and work together towards common goals.
Social tokens are a new way for creators to earn money online. They eliminate rent-seeking intermediaries and facilitate the development of micro-economies that grow alongside their fanbases.
Blockchain-based social networks make strong commitments to users and developers, allowing them to build on a solid foundation without worrying about changes in APIs and economics.
Crypto-supported 3D worlds and metaverse experiences allow people to socialize, earn money, and build mini-worlds while ensuring interoperability and true ownership.
These are some ideas, but entrepreneurs are better at creating the future than people like me are at predicting it. It’s likely that the best ideas are either yet to be conceived or seem very foreign to us today.
If you work in crypto, you get used to outsiders looking at you with curiosity or thinking what you’re doing is foolish or a scam. We often don’t have names for the work people are engaged in. It’s too new.
That’s what it feels like to work at the beginning of an S-curve. Programmable blockchains are the frontier of computing, just like personal computers in the 80s, the internet in the 90s, and mobile devices in the past decade.
We look back at classic moments in computing today and wonder what it felt like to be there.

But you are there! The Homebrew Computer Club of 2021 (note: a famous hacker organization from the late 70s) is like a DAO or Discord server, but the pattern is the same. Enthusiasts share ideas with each other. Hackers tinker at night and on weekends. Those were the good old days------living on the edge.