Crossing the chasm for web2 devs

Transcript

okay hello everyone thank you for good morning thank you for coming here this uh thursday morning in paris it's great to be here uh i am park firebuck i run the protocol team over at figment i o we're sticking as a service provider um so i'm gonna be talking a little bit about today about bringing web 2 development trends into web 3 and some ways that we've done it and some things that we think could happen in the future that are kind of like a white space for things that could happen so a little bit about a segment first uh we were founded in 2018 uh we were a very small team in january of last year and now we're 240 people uh so the bull market was very kind to us

um but we were also valued at 1.4 billion as a staking provider which puts us right at the top of the game in a big way and that's because we have a strong era of professionalism with a lot of the chains that we support and we have a broad view of the of the whole space so we we support more than 60 different networks we're planning on continuing to do that we'll hit over 100 at the end of the year that's a big aim of ours because we aim to support everything that exists in this space so asking ourselves like also what kind of infrastructure do we provide across different chains so i had 60 in the last slide i have 65 on this one that's because we provide different services to different chains right so we support all these different chains we support rpc endpoint access

and we also support staking services across all of these different chains so we've gotten through the gamut a lot of different options that are available to developers for building in the web3 environment and so we've experimented with a lot of things we've tried a lot of things out some things haven't worked some things have worked and we're here just to kind of share a little bit more things that we think could work for the future and some observations about people who are coming from web 2 into web 3 and why it is that they kind of want to move over and the most important thing to keep in mind here is we're focused on time to market implementation because that is a web 2 standard right you want to be able to build everything that you have in your implementation with a very short path to

actually getting it launched and getting people using it otherwise you don't get users but off the bat it also just like eases people's familiarity with like the experience of being in web 2. so what are web 2 dubs looking for when it comes to coming to web 3. so a big one is what i just already mentioned right the user experience of developing in web 2 has gotten to the point where it's almost like an artistic experience for some people so you can just kind of use a lot of these from building blocks that exist out there and a lot of it is very reliable by contrast web 3 doesn't really have that all that much we're still building a lot of these pieces so this is something that we we've been very focused on is we want to be able to build in the direction of reliability

good user experience and that's a trend we want to see throughout the entire space and frankly it's not really there there's a long way to go but that's where we're kind of aiming for the other part that's really important to a lot of web 2 dubs that are specifically looking at the advantages of web3 is that all the all the pieces that they have available to them are open-ended and open sourced with a high degree of integration and so what that means is in web 3 you are not locked into the platforms that you're working off of it means that you don't have to operate entirely within a closed framework and this is a trend we see across the entirety the web3 market in all forms of implementation but especially at the development level right working off the development level you want to be able to take the pieces

you have decide what works and what doesn't work and kind of move across implementations and kind of use the building blocks that are available in a way that in web 2 you were kind of a lot more locked to platforms and you could have options but a lot of times the platforms that were that you'd be building on would be engaging with high switching costs to try to lock you into the experience of operating on there so web 3 we don't have that trend so we try to move away from it and that's definitely a trend that we see with web2dubs who want to come to web3 is they won't have the flexibility of implementation as well they wanted to have the ability to integrate quickly so a lot of that is this is a web 2 trend that we want to see in web3 we don't

really see it is good documentation so that you can so you can really exert the full potential of the tools that you're you're trying to use that's another trend obviously it's just a it's a problem that has to do with the the youth of this market is that documentation is not usually always up to date but that is something that um that is very useful to devs is being able to actually understand how to troubleshoot the things you're working on but as well also just creating a better aggregation of tool utility so what i mean by that that sounds like a very buzzwordy thing to say but aggregation of tool utility means can you can you show other pieces of the stack that work with what you have even if they're not yours now that's not something you really saw in web 2 all that often a lot of times

would be like these one-to-one relationships you'd be like you create a compelling compatibility matrix with a single piece and then you'd be locked into that relationship as well so in web 3 a lot of times they want the they want a simplification of implementation and a flexibility of implementation so the core thing that web two devs really are looking for is this like stackability fork ability and composability with the open source code that they're engaging with that means they want to be able to take all the different pieces of the stock and put them together however they want and this this is what affords that free flexibility and how it is that you're building if you don't like something the way something's built you can take the code fork it make your own version that's something that in web 2

traditionally in closer software has been very difficult with open source software has become like a lot easier to do right it's not necessarily exclusively a web 3 trend but in web 3 it's a core premise of the work that we're doing and so that's something that web two devs are really looking for is is your implementation open source do you have the ability to sort of plug and play it into a bunch of other pieces and is it something that um that you can use widely across all the different platforms you want to use and so the key thing here to really keep in mind is this last statement here working with rev3 building blocks means you're building with protocols not platforms so the key term there is understand what a protocol is so what does it mean to build with

protocols protocols are what are called open primitives so that means building pieces that you know you can use flexibly in adaptable ways for whatever scenario you encounter in the future so you want to be able to design freely they're environmentally agnostic specific to wherever it is that they're built sometimes it's not completely environmentally agnostic but that's what you aspire to right protocols can't keep you tied to them and protocols are also emergent and the emergent quality of protocols is the fact that they have this fork ability you can adapt them to the circumstance that you're trying to operate inside of and that's something that is highly advantageous when it comes to protocols and working within protocols themselves so this is all great right having all this stuff accessible to you being able to

operate within um a a protocol framework and sort of stacking things together and operating off of that off of that basis but the reality is you kind of need something that brings all that stuff together because as you have all these tools developed and as you have this high degree of workability you also have fragmentation of all of the tools and utilities that are available in the market so you kind of need some things that kind of bring that together and that's another thing that we kind of think needs to be built so web web 2 open source also had a compensation problem that's a problem that we've seen and it's something that i don't think web 3 is necessarily solved there are a few people who are working in that direction but it's not really solved yet

but the idea that devs who put a ton of work into things should be compensated for the effort that's put into it sometimes this is done at the protocol level with like a token distribution or something along those lines but the reality is on an ongoing basis as as code becomes useful it's not necessarily given a degree of a compensation equivalent to its value and you see a lot of people in web 2 who set up pieces of the stack that other people rely on never got compensated for it are still maintaining out of a passion project we really want to change that in web3 right so that's another part that's a really important trend to pull in therefore as i mentioned right if you have all of these different

pieces of the stack you want to be able to have something that brings all these fragmented pieces together and this is something that we worked on when it comes to data hub you want to be able to bring together all of the 3 needs into one place where people can actually use them so in contrast to what i said right you want to operate with protocols not platforms we built a platform we built a platform to aggregate pieces of the stack so since the web 3 since web3 is evolving so is the technology stack that means each piece of that modular stack is changing constantly and you need to be able to switch these things in and out and so you want people who are doing the work of taking all those pieces making them presentable to developers so that they can take the pieces themselves and use them at will

otherwise they have to go out and do that research themselves they don't have a high flexibility of implementation interaction between the pieces and it's a very useful role to play in the market so we worked very hard to do that so our approach to it was to have um all the different services that we can integrate right the smart smart contract platform storage services indexing services and app specific services available to developers with a native environment for them to operate outside of so this is this was our approach this is also something that we think should be done more generally i think it's a trend that should it should should exist uh broadly across the market and it is something that we push for ourselves we ourselves right we focused on

protocol diversity and dev tooling and that's something that i think as we're pointing out with the rest of the market is not necessarily been the case when it comes to tool aggregation so this is a trend i would like to see as much as this may look like kind of like a figment shilling slide and it somewhat is the reality is i just want everyone up in this corner that's really what i would like i would like people to be pushing in the direction of diversity i would like people to be pushing in the direction of building good dev tooling so people can interact with the open environment a lot more so building with tooling aggregators allows you to build all the different pieces of the web3 stack so that people can flexibly build what it is that they want to build very quickly iterate quickly and find

adoption a lot more quickly and that's how we'll move towards this this hope of the next billion users in in web3 without good tooling aggregation you don't have that people have to fish for a long time they have to find the right tools it's all done through a social mechanism tooling aggregation is a strong way forward so where do we go from here realistically we're in the open stages of web3 adoption we're still very much in a builder market people like to sell this idea that we're going to enter the adoption phase very soon but the primitives are still being built so earlier in this presentation all the things that i talked about right these questions about uh how is it that you build um an

adaptable framework how is it that you create increase optionality and specifically how do you build open primitives we don't have open primitives settled just yet so the important thing that we have to do is focus on building open primitives giving people availability to utilizing those primitives and seeing whether or not they work in implementation that's what the future of web3 really could be so in in in that same direction what you want to do is you want to have people on the market who are building for that kind of availability and without that availability you're we're not going to see the the degree of adoption that we're looking for across the entire market so that's my presentation and i would love to offer you all some time to ask some questions about that

and how it is that we approached it and if you have any questions in that direction [Applause] yeah i know it's the morning and it's a bit tough i like to think they were floored by my presentation they're speechless yeah so maybe i i do have a questions a question so you talked about diversity in terms of how tooling need to access multiple protocols for example um how you how you can take this decision

as you know that maybe it will uh defocus your team to maybe um you know add a diversity in your tooling uh and you have to the trade-off of being more performant in the use case you have now uh versus uh adding more diversity in order to link that's a great question because that's a problem we ran into right we focused exclusively on one platform for a really long time and it was very much also to our detriment so specializing in a particular environment also has the trade-off of meaning that you can't adapt to other trends in the market so i don't know it's kind of an opposite answer to what it is you you asked but the reality is you kind of want to be able to do somewhere in the

in the middle there's also something that is a hugely important trend in web 3 which i really hope to see people doing which is open collaboration so you can focus on a single platform and be willing to work with other people in the market not a lot of people are willing to do that because they're still using a web 2 mentality a web 3 mentality is a lot more open a lot more collaborative build stronger relationships and will move us towards this state where what we're working on is something we all need rather than what we're working on is something that we're trying to sell to each other technology is the thanks part of changing people yeah realistically that is the truth right like we're selling a vision as

much as it is that we're selling something that is a useful tool and changing that mindset of this like capitalist money grab is going to be part of what's going to what it's going to take to get people to really move into this next stage of how it is you can use the internet a sovereignty focused internet is not exclusively about financial sovereignty it's also about the flexibility of implementation it's also about the flexibility of of expression it's also about the flexibility of how it is that you as an as an individual in the market can can function yeah it's it's hard to get people to change that mindset but that's kind of like the um what's the term looking for here it's the um abundance mindset right you

want to go from a perspective of saying there is a lot available there's a lot of optionality success can be collaborative cool well i really appreciate all of you coming here to listen to me and i hope you enjoy the rest of your day [Applause] you