Major computing waves usually have two phases: the skeuomorphic era and the native era.
In the skeuomorphic era, the design mindset is mostly borrowed from older fields. For instance, the early web was largely digital versions of pre-internet tasks such as letter writing and mail-order shopping. Websites then were mostly read-only.
It took roughly a decade for technologists to begin seriously considering that websites could be read/write, with users creating the content. That opened the door to web-native categories such as social networking, crowdfunding, and social productivity apps.
This same pattern is happening with crypto/web3. There are some excellent native web3 products, but in the main we are still in the skeuomorphic era. Many web3 products are borrowed from older domains.
Common skeuomorphic web3 concepts include offline ticketing, supply chain management, and record-keeping for offline assets. These can be good ideas, just as read-only websites were a good idea, but they only touch the surface of what web3 can be.
Many of today’s NFTs are borrowed from the offline world of art and collectibles. That makes people assume NFTs are confined to those areas, in the same way people once assumed the web was limited to brochures and magazines.
Tokens — fungibles and NFTs — are better understood as new digital primitives, with flexibility and breadth similar to earlier digital primitives like the website.
Tokens give users property rights: the chance to own a piece of the internet.
Web2 omitted digital property rights. When you use a site (or app), it would only allow you to borrow or rent things. Picture having to purchase everything from the beginning every time you entered a new place. That’s web2.
Like websites, tokens are digital primitives that can be extended to stand for almost anything — money, art, photo, music, text, code, game items, control, access, and whatever people imagine in the future.
Users can now have a persistent inventory of objects in their wallet that they take from one app to another. If their objects increase in value, the user gets the upside. This is a big change from Web 2 where the upside was mostly captured by tech companies.
We are still very much in the skeuomorphic era of web3, but we are beginning to see a new wave of native applications with no earlier analogue that simply could not have existed before.
For example, building on mechanism designs pioneered by DeFi entrepreneurs, a new wave of DAOs are testing ways for groups to gather, pool resources, build things, and self-govern.
Composable NFT games like Loot encourage the community to build an entire world around one set of NFTs — an activity that would be impossible without the ownership and portability that web3 makes possible.
There is nothing inherent about fungible tokens that requires a link to money and finance, and nothing inherent about NFTs that requires a link to art and collectibles.
Those are excellent starting uses, and will probably stay very important, but tokens are better viewed as a new digital primitive, similar to the website — the atomic unit around which a new era of the internet is organized.
This first appeared here.