As the Internet of Value has grown to over 400 million holders of digital assets globally, a new era of using and interacting with blockchains is beginning. We encapsulate this sentiment as part of our thesis: ‘Living On-Chain. Below are the fundamental tenets of that thesis.
Most users today only hold digital assets - on exchanges. Until 2020, limited use cases existed for operating or interacting with blockchains beyond early primitives. In the last three years, we have witnessed the development of NFT token infrastructure, DAO Tooling, and more advanced and scalable smart contract logic enabling micro-transactions, locked tokens, wrapped items, and so forth. These new products and tools offer users new opportunities by bringing the digital world (Game items) and the physical world (financial products) into the ownership economy.
In the coming five to ten years, we believe that the crypto product stack will mature to a point where users will increasingly ‘live online’ between Web2 and Web3 systems, Similar to how desktop computing moved to mobile and local storage moved into the cloud, users, applications, and services will likewise move onto blockchains. Improved self-custody wallets and rising interest in account abstraction offer users a ‘profile’ for their blockchain engagements - providing them sole ownership over their (digital) money, permissions, and interactions with other dApps. Soul Bound Tokens enable reputation with a robust suite of tools, allowing the users to manage payroll, messaging, communities, trading, and content creation with on-chain components.
The future of crypto is built around bringing real-world assets, processes, services, and infrastructure onto blockchains, Such that users with their own account have the optionality to interact digitally with services, as they seamlessly do now through centralized Web2 service providers (X, Meta, Amazon, etc.). This is the era of decentralized SaaS, E-Commerce, and Social Networks fit for a multi-polar world, with artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and the ‘rest of the world’ coming onto the internet.
This peer-to-peer internet offers unique value propositions to users (ownership, value accrual, financial independence, and freedom) while also offering enterprises and industries new ways of digitally conceptualizing and imbuing value into analog processes. What is today bonds and carbon credits moving on-chain will tomorrow be health records, research archives, and global data markets. The future of the internet ‘Lives on a Blockchain.’
The ‘Living On-Chain Thesis’ In Practice
Our unique approach to the ‘Living On-Chain Era’ is rooted in understanding the ‘tech tree ’ for the crypto product stack: How have DAOs, Non-Fungible Tokens, Token Standards, and Account Abstraction enabled new and compelling products for users to engage with, Charting this growth trajectory, we evaluate how each major crypto vertical (DeFi, Gaming, Creator Economy, Governance, ReFi, DeSci, etc.) may evolve in the coming years. Our vision is to pioneer the early infrastructure, protocols, token innovation, and consumer use cases that enable a world where billions of people live on-chain daily.
