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a16z partner: We are still in the Web 3 skeuomorphic era, but the emergence of tokens has spawned a new round of native applications

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a16z partner Chris Dixon believes that many Web 3 products are adaptations of old areas.

Original title: "a16z Partner: Beyond web2, tokens are a new digital native"

Original source: Chris Dixon, a16z general partner

Original translation: Shenchao

a16z partner Chris Dixon expressed his latest opinion. He divided the wave of the Internet into two eras. One is the skeuomorphic era, which is similar to moving offline mail online to become email, and the other is the digital native era. For example, websites are unique to the Internet era, and Token is also digitally native. Most web3s are still in the skeuomorphic era.

The following is the full text of the opinion:

a16z 合伙人：代币是网站之后新的数字基元，它赋予了用户产权

1/ Tokens are a new digital primitive, similar to websites.

2/ The major computing waves generally have two eras: the skeuomorphic era and the native era.

3/ In the skeuomorphic era, design thinking was largely adapted from earlier fields. For example, the early web was mostly digital adaptations of pre-internet activities like letter writing and mail ordering, and websites at that time were mostly read-only.

4/ It was about a decade later that technologists began to seriously explore the idea that websites could be read/write, with user-generated content. This led to the development of web-native categories like social networks, crowdfunding, and social productivity apps.

5/ This pattern is repeated in cryptocurrency/Web 3. There are some great native Web 3 products, but overall, we are still in the skeuomorphic era. Many Web 3 products are adaptations of older fields.

6/ Popular skeuomorphic Web 3 ideas include offline ticketing, supply chain management, and record keeping for offline assets. These may be good ideas, just like read-only websites are a good idea, but they only scratch the surface of Web 3.

7/ Many of today’s NFTs are adapted from the offline world of art and collectibles. This leads people to think of NFTs as limited to those realms, just as people once thought of the web as limited to brochures and magazines.

8/ Tokens—both physical and NFTs—are best thought of as new digital primitives that are similar in flexibility and versatility to digital primitives of the past, like websites.

9/ Tokens give users property rights: the ability to own a piece of the internet.

10/ Web 2 leaves out digital property rights. When you use a website (or app), it only lets you borrow or rent things. Imagine if in the real world you had to buy things from scratch every time you went to a new place. That’s Web 2.

11/ Like websites, tokens are digital primitives that can be generalized to represent almost anything — money, art, photos, music, text, code, game items, control, access, and anything people dream up in the future.

12/ Users can now have a persistent inventory of objects in their wallets that they can take from app to app. If their items appreciate in value, the user gets the benefit of that appreciation. This is very different from Web 2, where the gains are mostly reaped by tech companies.

13/ We’re still in the skeuomorphic era of Web 3, but are starting to see a new wave of native applications that have no analogues before and simply could not have existed before.

14/ For example, building on the mechanism design pioneered by DeFi entrepreneurs, a new wave of DAOs are exploring ways for groups to come together, pool resources, build things, and govern themselves.

15/ Composable NFT games like Loot incentivize communities to build entire worlds around a set of NFTs — activity that wouldn’t be possible without the ownership and portability that Web 3 enables.

16/ There’s nothing inherent about fungible tokens that needs to be associated with money and finance, and there’s nothing inherent about NFTs that needs to be associated with art and collectibles.

17/ These are all great initial applications, and will likely remain very important, but tokens are best thought of as a new kind of digital primitive, similar to websites — the atomic unit around the new era of the internet.