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No single entity, interest group, or political faction defines the blockchain industry. Despite differences, there is a shared mission—achieving mass adoption.

More people, businesses, and communities must benefit from crypto and blockchain technology worldwide. To achieve this, developers should be able to build high-quality dApps and on-chain tools. They must have the freedom to express themselves in any language and on any chain, allowing them to build once and deploy anywhere.

While recent institutional uptake and political attention might seem exciting, they are mostly driven by vested interests. As Vitalik Buterin pointed out, what’s ‘crypto-friendly now’ does not mean crypto-friendly five years from now. Good dApps, however, are actual manifestations of blockchain’s principles and potential. Once deployed, they can continue serving the community on pre-defined terms enforced by censorship-resistant blockchains—ideally, even when the original creator is no longer involved, as with Bitcoin.

The endgame is empowering developers and users. No single interest or agenda, political or technological, should determine the path forward. In its purest form, crypto represents freedom—freedom from intermediaries and censorship, and freedom to express through code.

DApps Make Blockchain Real and Valuable

Blockchain technology must solve real, day-to-day problems to transition from speculative adoption to long-term mass adoption. However, the recent spike in financial nihilism and meme coin adoption shows that people care more about speculation than foundational principles.

Speculation without actual underlying value is unsustainable. Only those apps and platforms that generate value through fees, transaction volumes, etc., will still be around in ten years or more. For example, as of August 7, 2024, Uniswap collected about $13 million in weekly fees—that’s hundreds of millions in annual revenue. With the 10x price-to-earnings heuristic often applied to high-growth tech companies, Uniswap’s $4.5 billion valuation seems appropriate.

DApps make crypto and blockchain technology usable for end-users. They bring the power of immutable code—which doesn’t need intermediaries—to the masses. Trading, lending, gaming, and rideshares can all happen without any single entity opaquely and unfairly extracting value.

Given crypto’s roots in Bitcoin and its close proximity to money, finance was the first industry to be disrupted. But the recent rise of decentralized gaming, social networks (DeSoc), physical infrastructure (DePIN), AI, etc., on cost-effective and high-throughput chains like Base or Solana shows how the technology has a much wider scope than just disrupting financial products and processes.

This is why there is a rising demand in the global dApp industry, where daily unique active wallet interactions reached an all-time high in Q2 2024.

Landline telephones took 99 years to reach peak adoption. Automobiles took 78. Computers, however, crossed 89% adoption in 24 years. Social media and tablets achieved a similar feat in 14 and 7 years, respectively.

This shows how newer technologies have achieved majority adoption in significantly less time than their predecessors. But key enablers must be present for this, which dApps can provide for blockchain technology.

From user-friendly graphical interfaces to making backend components frictionless and invisible to end-users, dApps are inevitable. Those who say blockchain needs more dApps and less infrastructure are quite right from this perspective.

Anywhere, Anytime, All at Once

As crypto continues to grow, many talented developers have entered the space, including some of the brightest minds from Google, Meta, IBM, and more. Great things have happened as a result. The rise of Move from Diem’s ashes and the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) from FTX are examples of a new generation of developers choosing alternatives to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) status quo. Lowering the barriers to dApp development is now mission-critical so more projects can emerge.

For a long time, the EVM has been the only standard available to blockchain developers. Along with Solidity, the EVM was built to deploy and run custom programs on Ethereum. Similarly, there is the Solana VM on Solana, Move VM on Aptos or Sui, Web Assembly on Cosmos, etc. Although these innovations have many merits, they have caused fragmentation and vendor lock-in. EVM-based dApps can’t run natively on Solana, and SVM-based dApps can’t use Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, or other EVM-powered platforms.

Deploying dApps on multiple chains is cumbersome and costly. Developers have to create and maintain multiple code bases. Truly multi-chain and interoperable dApps are challenging to develop. Projects like AAVE or Pancakeswap are exceptions, as they have the necessary resources for multi-chain deployment. However, even for them, innovation in non-EVM code lags behind EVM code due to high costs and time requirements. For end-users, vendor lock-in means they need to use multiple wallets and hold assets from various ecosystems because their favorite dApp, wallet, or token doesn’t support the new chain they want to use.

Developers want freedom from such walled gardens to ensure blockchain’s long-term progress. They must be able to build an application once and offer it to users across ecosystems, asset classes, and VMs—not just one. Users have a similar need.

Abstracting wallets, chains, and even VMs is a viable solution. It will let developers build dApps on any VM in any programming language and run them on every other chain or VM with little or no additional costs and without security compromises.

Further, abstracting away the underlying complexities will allow anyone to build robust dApps with a few clicks. This will change everything. Web3 will mirror Web2’s performance and speed after the mass market adoption of container technologies like Kubernetes, which helped get rid of public cloud vendor lock-in. Builders can utilize different chains and platforms for different aspects of their dApps based on specific needs and demands, such as Solana for high-frequency transactions and Ethereum for settlement finality and data availability.

Solving vendor lock-in will improve the developer and end-user experience. Everyone can reap the benefits of the underlying tech stack, paving the way for mass adoption. More dApps can enter the market than ever before. All of them won’t be great, but the more there are, the higher the chances of finding the next game-changer.

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