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Chris Dixon, PARTNER, A16Z: Blockchain is the new app store

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A blockchain is said to be programmable when it has a highly expressive, nearly Turing-complete programming language.

Blockchains are the New App Stores

By Chris Dixon

The chain catcher

If you were an ambitious, adventurous founder in the golden age of mobile around 2009-12, you developed a new mobile app. That was when Uber, WhatsApp, Instagram, Venmo, Snapchat and many other top apps were born.

Since then, the adoption rate of mobile technology has shown an S-shaped curve. Still build great mobile apps, but you've picked the low-hanging fruit. The computing frontier of this decade is building applications on programmable blockchains like Ethereum.

Blockchains are virtual computers that run on top of a network of physical computers. They have new properties and capabilities that previous types of computers didn't have.

A blockchain is said to be programmable when it has a highly expressive, nearly Turing-complete programming language. The most popular programmable blockchain is Ethereum.

We saw this during last year's "DeFi summer" as the first wave of encryption/blockchain killer applications exploded: Uniswap, Aave, Compound, Maker, etc.

DeFi shows that it is possible to build inclusive, fair, transparent and combinable financial services. On Wall Street, value flows to the institution at the center. In DeFi, value flows out to people on the edge.

NFT and Games are the next wave of blockchain applications to explode this year: NBA Top Shot, CryptoPunks, Axie Infinity, and more. You can see this reflected in the rapid growth in total sales of OpenSea, the largest NFT market:

To some people, NFT looks frivolous, like a toy. But NFT is important because they offer better economics for creators and developers than the existing Web 2 platforms.

What will be the next wave of blockchain killer apps? The computer wave is hard to predict, but there are some interesting emerging categories.

Daos (Decentralized autonomous organizations) are the Internet's native global collectives that share resources, build products, and work together to achieve common goals.

Social tokens are a new way for creators to make money online. They have eliminated rent-seeking agents and fostered microeconomies that grow along with their fan bases.

Blockchain-based social networks make a strong commitment to users and developers, so they can build on a solid foundation without worrying about API and economic changes.

Crypto-enabled 3D world and meta-universe experiences allow people to socialize, make money, and build mini-worlds while ensuring interoperability and true ownership.

These are some ideas, but entrepreneurs are better at creating the future than people like me predicting it. It is likely that the best ideas are either unconceived or seem alien to us today.

If you work in the crypto world, you're used to outsiders looking at you as funny, or thinking what you're doing is stupid or a scam. We often don't have a name for what people are doing. Is too new.

This is what it feels like to work at the beginning of the s-curve. Programmable blockchains are at the forefront of computing, just like personal computers were in the 1980s, the Internet was in the 1990s, and mobile devices were in the last decade.

We look back today at classic moments in computing and wonder what it was like to be there.

But you were there! The Homebrew Computer Club of 2021 is a DAO or Discord server, but the pattern is the same. Lovers share ideas with each other. Tinkers hack at night and on weekends. These are the good old days -- life on the edge.