On the Fat Protocol Thesis

The infrastructure is here already

In 2016, Joel Monegro published the Fat Protocol thesis. The main takeaway from that post was that in the emerging world of distributed applications (dApps), we have a chance to re-imagine what the fundamental protocols for this new generation of web applications is going to look like. Instead of building apps on top of standardized internet protocols that haven’t changed in decades (e.g. TCP, IP, UDP), we finally have a chance to re-think what those protocols should look like to support the next generation of applications.

While most members of the blockchain community seem to have accepted the fat protocol thesis, the consensus seems to have been that to bring about the next generation distributed & decentralized apps, the infrastructure needs to be there first. That is to say, the consensus appears to be that the killer app built on the blockchain isn’t here yet only because the infrastructure isn’t here yet.

That claim is false.

A couple of weeks ago, USV published the post which put forward a theory that instead of the applications following the infrastructure, it would be the other way around — the infrastructure will follow the applications. It caused quite some chatter back and forth in the community, which I think that is good for the community.

I am more comfortable with that theses. It’s time to build some real end-user applications.

While I recognize that the infrastructure layer is in flux and there’s no clear winner yet, we’re at a point where it’s is almost there. To draw an analogy to email protocols, we’ve already got POP in the distributed world, and IMAP is ready to appear but will be dictated by how people end up using email. Keep in mind that first drafts of IMAP’s specification appeared within two years of people using email.

However, what we haven’t achieved yet is protocol-application fit. That’s also not because we’ve not built the applications yet. The apps so far are either yet another cryptocurrency or something a few developers built, but doesn’t resemble a finished product.

The infrastructure however ready for early adopters to be able to start using some real applications. Much like Twitter in the pre-Scala migration days had some real performance and uptime issues, most early adopters circa 2009 still used it. The blockchain infrastructure in 2018 is plenty capable.

Here’s what we need to get us to the next milestone:

End user applications that are not (crypto)currencies

While cryptocurrency is here to stay, yet another crypto-coin is the laziest application you can build on this new distributed infrastructure. There are more than enough coins already. Yet most of us would be hard pressed to name 5 distributed applications that are worth using today. Outside of crypto-currency oriented applications (exchanges, custodians, etc.) I can’t download a dApp on my phone. Even if I did, I shouldn’t have to own ether to use my favorite dApp. Most users won’t and shouldn’t care if the application they’re using is a dApp or not, much less about the infrastructure protocol it’s using. The average email use does not think about IMAP when they use Outlook or Apple Mail.

Even if it’s a simple news app or a chat tool. We need the champion of the current blockchain infrastructure to not be yet another attempt at a decentralized exchange.

Product thought leadership

The few dApps I have used today, are clunky and disorienting. The dApp experience should be no different than using my favorite consumer apps today. One dApp I recently used was a supply chain solution using a “Proof of Human Work” algorithm for consensus. Their approach to providing human work for this consensus mechanism was to include a video game in their mobile app. I’m sorry, but your logistics users aren’t just going to be playing sub-par games on their work app just because your technology requires that they do so.

 All of the plumbing (token management) in your app should be abstracted away from your end users. Similarly, there’s no reason I should have to buy ETH to consume news, and EOS to talk to some of my friends and QTUM to talk to some of my other friends. Just because WhatsApp uses end to end encryption for your chats doesn’t mean that the end users are managing public and private encryption keys and certificates and securing them manually.

Design leadership

The few dApps that do exist today, remind you of the Windows mobile (not Windows Phone) experience circa 2007.While multi-touch displays were already mature, few device manufacturers had designed a coherent experience that flowed around multi-touch gestures until the iPhone came around.

Blockchain is ready to graduate from the nerd-land. Product designers and user experiences folks need to start paying attention to how the next generation of the web is starting to shape up, and create beautiful user experiences centered around the user, not the developer.

Marketing blockchain

Even for people working in technology today, a blockchain is often synonymous to bitcoin and/or “internet money”. For a lot of people, the Internet was synonymous to E-mail for the first few years of it’s existence. It took a lot of marketing and customer education for the late majority to get comfortable with using the Internet for more than just email. A few of the early leaders from different domains collectively educated the market on e-commerce, content consumption, social media and chat messaging. The opportunity to do that with the blockchain is here — for better or worse, the pioneers of this new world have to lay the rails for the distributed and decentralized train that’s fast approaching.

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”― Sun-Tzu,

The next 12–18 months are a time of great opportunity — the trends in the market indicate that a lot of the fluff has been culled in the great crypto crash of 2018. Out of the last year of insanity and chaos, and the growing disenchantment with Google & Facebook, the market conditions to take a shot at decentralizing various parts of their offerings are here.