I wrote a post recently as to why web3/crypto matter. A logical follow on question is: why aren’t we further along, given that Bitcoin is over ten years old? Part of the answer is that blockchain technology is complex and there is still a lot to figure out. But another part of the answer is that there is a chicken and egg problem to be solved that has echoes of the historic adoption of the web itself.
I remember well discovering the web in a lab at MIT due to the Mosaic web browser showing up on a workstation that I was using for one of my stats classes. But at home people faced a conundrum. They had heard of the web but how could they get on it? For that they needed a web browser and where was that going to come from? Today there isn’t a phone or laptop or desktop that doesn’t ship with one or more browsers pre-installed, so it is easy to forget this initial problem. Most people had never used something like FTP and so asking them to figure out how to do so in order to download a browser was a non-starter.
As it turned out there were two solutions to this problem. The first was AOL mailing CDs to pretty much everyone. That of course was aimed at keeping people inside AOL’s walled garden, but AOL software did include a web browser. The more important solution, however, was Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Yes, this was part of the infamous strategy to “cut off Netscape’s air supply.” And yes, I don’t like monopoly power bundling strategies. But it is indisputable that the widespread availability of Internet Explorer is what allowed the web to take off. Here’s an annotated chart of early web growth that shows this quite clearly:
Web3 very much needs a similar moment today. Apple is notoriously anti crypto because it would make it so much easier to go around their lucrative Appstore business. That’s why it is a bit more surprising that Google hasn’t already made a crypto wallet part of Android (and/or simply included it in Google Pay).
The vast bulk of endusers is no more likely to install a crypto wallet today than they were a web browser back then. That leaves dapps/web3 developers with a huge hurdle, much like early websites: someone without a pre-installed wallet is basically impossible to convert into a user.
So if someone at Google is paying attention: include a multi-currency wallet in Android pronto and watch Apple squirm.
