The Neglected World of dApps

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I'm sick

of dApps not getting enough love from users, developers, ecosystems, and VCs. Users don't love trying new dapps because of smart contract risks. It's way safer to just trade memecoins on known DEXes than signing random messages that look like gibberish.

VCs don't love funding dApps. The belief of fat protocol (not necessarily true in the future but definitely true for now) means fees accrue to the infrastructure, making it more like a sure bet to invest in infra versus dApps.

It's difficult for ecosystem to support dApps. They carry reputation risk for promoting dApps because dApps can rug or be hacked. Thus making it hard to justify the "reputational" investment (arguably more expensive than capital, because reputation is finite and non-renewable).

Developers don't love building dApps neither. It's difficult to raise money. It's difficult to acquire users. It's difficult to receive ecosystem support. This is why we are seeing the same group of developers over and over again: new devs don't have a chance to build dApps.

We used to pride ourselves for being innovative, for building the future of france. But now it's the same people building the 42069th AMM/lending with minor twists here and there. How do we change this? How do we Make dApps Great Again ??

One, we need better dApp security. Audit/bounty are not enough. We need 1. active protection like hacker TX front-running @hackthedefi 2. token delegation @delegatedotxyz 3. circuit breaker (yet to see). Being hacked is inevitable, so build dApps that are resilient to hacks.

Two, we need better value accural/capture for dApps. dApps are only aware of execution layer and can only monetize activities happening on execution layer, by charging a % of the swap fees or % of AUM.

dApps need to be aware of layers such as transaction layers to start monetizing order flow, and in the future, maybe start monetizing attention/community too. Many infra (my own @SemanticLayer included) like @AstriaOrg @atlasevm @SkipProtocol are all giving dApps this ability.

Three, we need to solve the ecosystem <> dev deadlock, where ecosystem ask devs to show development/deployment before support, devs ask ecosystem to show support before deployment/development. Incubation models like @AtriumAcademy (for UniV4) might be an answer.

Devs spend two months in workshops, working with mentors, building a prototype. Ecosystem gets the opportunity to select qualifying devs to continue the support. Both side starts with low-commitment and gradually ramp up for full support.

Hopefully I have explained well the reason behind "we don't have enough dApps" is actually not "we have too much infra," but multi-faceted reasons from multiple stakeholders: users/VCs/infra/ even devs themselves.

We need all stakeholders to be locked-in and committed to make it easier to build dApps. Otherwise, we as an industry will be losing the most innovative talents, as we already observed from the recent ETHCC with few new blood. We need to Make dApps Great Again!