Paradigm Shift: The Advent of Web3 superapps?

原文标题：《 范式转移：Web3 超级应用时代来临？ 》

Original article by Matti, Rapolas, Cam ZeePrimeCapital

Wang Eryu, PANews

Building Super Applications: Fat Applications and Fat Protocols

Musk tweeted that he was buying Twitter to speed up the creation of super apps

The concept of Fat Protocols was proposed by Joel Monegro in 2016. This has been a good investment theme so far (as long as it is chosen well), but in the long run, the concept seems inadequate for the deals that are creating most of the value.

Let's talk about the Fat App (FAPP) Thesis, for which the hypothesis goes: Let's Talk about the Fat App (Fapp) Thesis, for which the hypothesis goes:

Here, we propose the concept of fat application (FAPP) and assume the following:

An application (or several) that offers a wide range of products will accumulate the most value.

Web 2's dominant applications tend to start out in a specialized area, and once they gain dominance, they offer a range of different products that leverage network effects and take advantage of their users:

"Engage them with tools, imprison them with networks."

In encryption, the killer apps and products to date stand out in many ways. Binance is one of the best. It's been taking care of everyone and gradually offering all crypto-related products within its hosting platform. FTX and its high-frequency trading platform were originally one.

SBF spoke to Sequoia Capital, an investor, about its ambitions to become a super app

From the start, the dominant Web 2.1 applications were transactional platforms offering a wide range of services that seemed to form the gateway to Web 3. We think the same logic applies to pure Web 3 chain products.

The chart below lists the most profitable encryption protocols/applications (both centralized and decentralized) :

On a cost basis:

In terms of earnings:

This is the new "paradigm shift"; Value accumulator from protocol to application (or a specific application?) . Ironically, trading platforms are not Web 3 applications. They are Web 2 through and through, licensing and centralized, but extracting a lot of value from the entire ecosystem.

In the future, we believe protocols are likely to lose out to Web 3 native applications in the battle for value. There are two possible paths:

1.  Appchains

2. Super apps for everything

We define super apps as the "wechat of encryption". It sounds scary, but this dystopian vision can actually come true. The Internet follows a long tail: one or two Amazon-level dominant players in front, followed by a plethora of smaller players fighting for the rest of the market.

Here's a bit of distant history.

History class

Many have compared blockchains to cities and ethereum to modern-day Manhattan. We have different views. The current construction is primitive, and we'll compare blockchains to religions and apps to cities.

We think of today's apps as medieval cities whose place in history is still relatively tenuous compared to modern Manhattan. In our analogy, blockchain is religion and Ethereum is the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages.

Medieval cities were founded on papal agreements and enjoyed only half autonomy, with the Pope having supreme power. The Pope was involved in setting tax policy and guidelines, the Bible was the main basis for tax law, and fees flowed to Rome.

V god

In short, along came a developer named Martin, tacked a white paper on the church door with 95 lines of code, and a few years later, there was a hard fork. Some verifiers joined the forked new protocol, others decided to stay.

As a result, applications (cities and duchies) became more independent, and over the centuries, the Holy See's influence over the direction of fees declined. The Holy See still played a role, but the idea of the nation-state and secularism became popular, and new economic models emerged.

We want to say that the fat protocol concept is not dead, because we are still in the early days of the blockchain era, or Web 3. And apps as cities can organize themselves into powerful value-accumulating entities like nation-states, undermining the charging power of the clergy (blockchain).

In other words, over time, applications, mainly super apps or app chains, will accumulate more value.

App chains and super apps

The concept of app chains is not new, having first appeared in the 2016 Polkadot Yellow Book. It proposes the idea of heterogeneous chain sharing security through common verifier set. Cosmos proposes an alternative idea of heterogeneous chains: each chain is self-contained and unified only through the SDK.

Since then, most people have embraced the idea of shared security. Cosmos also changed its direction. The conclusion is that it is not easy to build a good set of validators from scratch, and it may not make sense to do so until the product finds a market. Obviously, poor quality block space is a parasite that wastes validator resources, and many times there are no real use cases.

Application chains are tailored: the core chain is optimized for existing and future use cases built on top of it. For example, liquidity chains can be designed to support decentralized financial applications through various concrete designs. Such application chains do not compete with other applications for block space and can advance the execution and cost logic that best suits their use cases.

We think that app chains are candidates for super apps. The development track is as follows:

1. Launch the application on the main network of a general chain, conduct proof of concept, and show whether the product matches the market. Cut into a known user base.

2. Achieve success by scaling back to multiple chains, or even starting your own execution environment (application chain) to exert greater control and gain more value. dYdX is a good example of how far this has come.

3. Eliminate all traces on the chain and the execution environment to provide a seamless super application experience. Engage users incrementally, adding features that get people to invest more time and money into the product.

4. Congratulations on being a super app.

AAVE, for example, seems to be trying to build a super-app that blends social and financial. This convergence promises to create a powerful moat (think credit/social scores for unsecured loans). Projects such as Ribbon also seem to be moving in this direction, customising their rollup and lending market to work with existing options products. The key point of both projects is incomplete mortgage lending, which is expected to unlock the true DeFi 2.0.

As shown in the chart above, Uniswap and Opensea are currently the largest applications by cost. They all started with a single use case that each excelled at and built up a critical mass of users (and robots) willing to pay ETH to use these applications. Each has since acquired NFT aggregators (Gem and Genie) to consolidate the core product (Opensea) or horizontally scale the product (Uniswap).

And whether it's the chicken or the egg, as long as there's liquidity, you can get users, and as long as there are users, you can provide them with more products and customized experiences. One way to do this is to provide your own product wallet to the user base and improve the user experience (not only better UI/UX, but also wallet features tailored to the product). Consumer-facing applications that can successfully launch product suites (platforms) and seamlessly engage users will stand out.

Liquidity is not the key to the rise of all super apps, if not just the various use cases of finance, but even then it depends on something else (games, for example, require engaging gameplay and a vibrant player economy).

Trojan middleware

The user-centric approach to super application development is described above. A simple DeFi app with a great user experience can gain market share, improve monetization, and build a moat through horizontal integration with traditional financial products and/or other on-chain products. At the technical level, these apps will move from simple smart contract interfaces to full-fledged super apps with their own app chain.

Trojan middleware is another option, which is welcomed through the front door of an application, bringing a better developer experience and advanced features such as account abstraction, jump start protection, and MEV cashback. Trojan middleware is a top-level transaction memory pool (mempool) that can dominate block construction by accessing the flow of orders from the application.

Through block building, Trojan middleware can provide functionality that the application itself cannot easily replicate, such as on-chain abstract transaction execution. Ultimately, control of touchpoints can be achieved by creating a great wallet/app store experience. Some block builders have demonstrated the ability to access exclusive order streams on which to build the kinds of things we're talking about:

But there is an alternative to being tricked by the Trojan Horse. We believe that the ultimate state of any ambitious super application is to become a major block builder. This provides the best experience for the super app user and the best guarantee for the transaction to be executed in the way the Super app sees fit.

In the same way that major consumer businesses in the Web2 space will seek to build their own payment channels to avoid becoming too dependent on a single provider, Web 3 super apps will seek to exert control over their users' financial operations.

Either way, here's what the super app will look like:

The bottom layer is the public chain and L2, the middle layer is the "open source" API and SDK, and the top layer is the super App Store

Superapps are expected to eventually act as encapsulators for Ethereum and other blockchains, as well as hosting terminals for all other future "apps" that will become individual features of Superapps. Even now, trading platforms can be seen as applications that encapsulate the blockchain to provide a better user experience. Most users can access a wide variety of content without leaving Binance.

Encrypted native applications that span all reasonable base layers and bridge seamlessly can effectively achieve extreme homogeneity of block space, i.e., commoditization. The best path to provide the best execution occurs naturally, and the user doesn't even know the exact execution trajectory. There are limits, of course. It depends on whether the quality (level of security) of the deployed blockchain is high enough.

In this sense, a super app requires different blockchain services. In addition, application chains are just another way to increase executive control. But in that sense, Super apps will ultimately be a centralized place.

Users and developers can access the blockchain directly, but super apps will be superior as blockchain abstractions in a number of ways:

1. Lower transaction costs

2. Smoother application development process

3. Better user experience

Superapps will become Amazon, but beyond that, users will still be able to use large amounts of blockchain directly, just as vendors and buyers use Shopify.

Block space war in the 2020s

A power struggle between the application and the base layer is inevitable. The base layer captures value through transaction fees (even if the fees themselves are draining away and the currency premium becomes harder to maintain) and provides security and a user base in return.

Successful apps with a loyal user base also seek their own way to capture value and exert greater control over how best to serve their users. In other words, applications want to share the foundation of blockchain's success: the currency premium embodied in the demand for native tokens.

There are several key pieces to this puzzle: Where does the transaction take place (the starting point)? Who controls the block building process (turning externalities into value capture)? What is the user's intention? And who makes the monetary rules?

The transactions that create value for the blockchain start at the application (or wallet) level. Users want apps, not blockchains, because they are not idealists, but mostly pragmatists. This power is bound to lead to a situation where application-specific blockchains become an execution option.

This provides a wider range of value capture capabilities, allows for better design trade-offs, and thus meets user needs better than the standardization layer. The base layer currently has an advantage only on the last factor, currency rules. And that advantage is temporary. Here's another piece of history:

In many ways, we can compare the base layer to the British Empire and the pound sterling. In the late 18th century, the American colonies rebelled against their British rulers over excessive taxes. This led to the Boston Tea Party, the American Revolution and the creation of the greatest "super app" in world history.

Nearly 200 years later, the British Empire collapsed after World War II, and the pound lost its reserve currency status to the dollar. This has also led many countries to flee the empire, with India being the next most obvious candidate for super apps. This is a real paradigm shift. When the base layer becomes a spent force, the application waits in the wings and becomes dominant, triggering conflict.

Remarkably, similar to global trade after the collapse of the British Empire, these countries are still trading. Driving a paradigm shift does not mean discarding the original base layers, but capturing value for yourself by siphoning their capabilities. The demand for block space is what drives protocol value capture, and the user end (super application) will determine where the demand comes from and where it goes.

This will drive the value of the application, as greater choice corresponds to the ability to make monetization decisions more frequently. The fat app concept is not pie in the sky, we see it as a paradigm-shifting scenario with the highest possibilities. In the process, someone will become a monopoly on composability.

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