Crypto Dialectics: Building consumer apps on nascent infrastructure
Entrepreneurs can wait for mature infrastructure to build consumer-facing crypto apps, or they can leverage what’s available and build some of the missing pieces themselves.
The prevailing thesis in blockchain is that we are in the infrastructure phase. In short, the thesis says that Web 3.0 infrastructure is not yet in place for effective consumer-facing apps to evolve. The compelling logic compares this to the way Instagram or Uber could not emerge on your old flip phone. These apps really needed the infrastructure — iPhone-like camera/GPS, connectivity, UX and general smartphone ubiquity — to catch on. But our experience building Props exemplifies why this narrative of a linear-progression and dichotomy between infrastructure (often referred to as “protocols”) and apps, as well as the overarching phases of deployment is over simplified and misleading. Earlier this week, our friends at USV published an insightful post about the myth of the infrastructure phase. They argue that the process of innovation is iterative, and it is incorrect to focus on infrastructure independent of the apps that use it.
I prefer Hegelian Dialectic as a general model to describe complex processes that a person, society, or new technology undergoes, rather than “textbook logic” models that describe a linear A → B → C progression. While the latter is often an easier model to popularize (“infrastructure now, apps later”), it is often too simplistic. The Dialectic model suggests that any initial thesis is too abstract and lacks the negative of trial, error and experience (antithesis) that the encounter with reality entails. Only then can the synthesis emerge. It is usually a better model to use when attempting to describe the way people grow, societies change and technologies emerge. It applies well to Web 3.0 evolution as well. Powerful infrastructure is not developed in a secluded lab and apps do not develop once the infrastructure is “ready”.
Yes, building a crypto-powered app today is harder than it will be in five years. No, not everybody in crypto should focus on building infrastructure at the moment. Building a crypto-powered consumer app today means more complexity, more tradeoffs, greater uncertainty, longer timelines and necessary reliance on a number of centralized pieces. You may also need to forgo rigid definitions of a team as builders of “a consumer app” versus “developer infrastructure”. Since not all the infrastructure a specific crypto consumer app needs actually exists today, as an app developer you may just have to build some of it yourself.
Since not all the infrastructure a specific crypto consumer app needs actually exists today, as an app developer you may just have to build some of it yourself.
The Props team experienced this over the past 18 months. It’s unclear whether we’ve been developing an app on nascent crypto infrastructure or actually building a lot of our own infrastructure. Neither accurately defines our work. Props uses blockchain and a cryptocurrency to create an increasingly decentralized digital media network that empowers the community that comprises it. Paraphrasing Jake Brukhman, Props is simultaneously a protocol for the stack above it — comprised of Props Apps like this one — and an application of the stack below it (Ethereum). Our first goal was simply to get two of our own apps to integrate the Props cryptocurrency in a seamless way and share information on the blockchain. But there is no Stripe APIs equivalent in crypto, yet.
Therefore, all the rails related to users holding, spending and receiving crypto, in a way that is user friendly, scalable and assumes little experience with cryptocurrency and very little tolerance for technical complexity — needed to be created. Similarly, a system for apps to issue these mass payments to users based on complex, changing logic also had to be created, and wrapped up in a way that is easy for apps to deploy and connect to their backend.
So we had to get creative in building our own wallet SDK for apps to deploy (PropsKit) and in developing server-side tooling that would make it easier for apps to interact with the blockchain (Props Sentinel). We’ve been building a backend crypto payments system (PropsPay) that apps can integrate and to top it all, we have been setting up our own Props blockchain — a sidechain to the Ethereum network, which enables faster, cheaper and more scalable information sharing. These are part of Props Apps’ infrastructure, in addition to the Ethereum network itself, which is used for the higher-value-lower-volume activity.
We’ve invested significant time and resources in building infrastructure just to get, as a first step, what we needed for our own apps. However, this infrastructure enables the integration of Props into any app in a user-friendly manner, providing the backbone for other developers to leverage it in the future (see open source code for some of the Props tooling). We had to build some infrastructure internally to support scaling issues, a bit like the way Amazon had to build some infrastructure for its e-commerce app. In their case, that infrastructure was very valuable for any scaling app and Amazon began offering it to others, calling it AWS. I can only hope that developers will find similar value in the scaling and payments solutions that we’ve developed to support our first crypto apps.
Infrastructure development, which has been an essential task in order to simply get Props tokens into YouNow apps, has indeed been a substantial effort. But we believe this is also the only way we could put Props in the hands of mainstream users a couple of years earlier than most projects. It also may become valuable infrastructure for other developers, who will create the next block in the chain and push the boundaries further out. This could be the synthesis of our very own Crypto Dialectics.
