The Upcoming Renaissance of "Super-dApps" with Alex Chiocchi

um thanks for joining me today so uh my name is Alex keoki and I'm here to talk about what I'm calling the upcoming Renaissance of super dapps so you've probably heard of dapps but uh there are no super dapps yet and we'll talk about what that could look like and I'm with uh Pagoda which is a major contributor to the near protocol and I'm the chief product officer there so I'm going to share a little bit of my perspective of my journey in web3 why wob3 is actually more centralized still than we really realize um why we need something new what a super dap is and what I'm doing to bring this hopefully um future forward so first my perspective so in my background I was originally starting a product career at LinkedIn I was there working with hundreds of millions of users then we got acquired by Microsoft and after that I did my own startup until I ended up doing some open source contributions and that led me to Kraken and I was the VP of product at Kraken for a little while and I worked on things like polka dot parachain auctions eth2 validator and staking and Bitcoin lightning and most recently I joined near uh and Pagoda within near because I've always had a feeling that uh user experiences could also become decentralized and that Nero was going to be the best protocol to be able to do that and I'll explain more about that later so let's talk about um you know the open web and I think there's really been two big epochs in the history of the open web so first of course is Bitcoin which gave us public ledgers and predictable value of currency and then we had ethereum which started automating trust and complex Financial transactions um through smart contracts but we haven't really seen like a revolutionary step there afterwards in terms of like decentralizing major parts of um you know the technology stack and that's led us on the front end to actually be in a centralized duopoly so on the left here we have or rather the right for you the Apple App Store where there's a 30 percent um essentially Apple tax on transactions that happen there and there's a single place in which Apple um you know has enforcement on all of the um apps that get submitted there that's led to certain conflicts you might say of Interest you've seen with like Riot um and coinbase and others uh and including meta and advertising and the rules are kind of changing all the time it's unclear it's kind of seems sometimes it's for Community good sometimes it might be for their own economic game those things are being played out in court cases as we speak and then on the other side we have Google Play Store which has a much lower percentage more reasonable at 15 percent um and what happens there actually though is that when you do complex transactions or complex actions um your data is being routed through their centralized servers which means there is a trail in which they can kind of create a fingerprint but they then sell into advertising systems and you may or may not be okay with that some people are um many people aren't and there actually have been um you know a number of projects that have kind of tried to fight back against this duopoly if you will um but it's really really difficult unless you're very very wealthy already so you have Alexa with Amazon which is actually a forked version of Android underneath they have their own operating system which all those devices run on uh they're a trillion dollar company it's fairly close Source still um so not exactly something that you know the average Community or average person can can really um you know be empowered by uh you've seen that audible still to this day doesn't do uh digital Goods transactions for their audio books through apps it's all done through a mobile website uh because they don't want to pay that uh Apple tax or the Google tax and then you may or may not know about a project seven or eight years ago called Firefox OS which was actually an attempt to build an open source operating system for all sorts of different uh devices whether it be mobile phones or TVs or even browsers unfortunately it didn't quite take off there were some internal conflicts but I think they had a lot of the right idea uh in terms of creating again a a more open web open source version of a front-end publishing platform so you might be thinking yourself well we still always have a client server website right we have a website in which we can um you know deploy uh our software and uh the web is still you know tcpip is an open protocol and things like Wikipedia and uh uniswap exist in this and they're great public goods and they're not um forced by that duopoly and that's true to a certain extent but there is a lot of risk that comes with a centralized client server uh Wikipedia is constantly under attack if you know anybody that works in that Foundation or Community constantly under attack by different governments and different uh you know I'd say non-nation State actors and uniswap if you've seen the news has had a lot of complications as well in terms of their continued operations of their front end so I think this kind of sets the stage that we need something new right um the existing paradigms really aren't meeting the promises of decentralization and web 3 owning your own uh data owning your own value right being able to have transparency and how things work and I think there are a few principles that we need to have in this new system so I'm going to do I'm a product person so I'm going to talk about principles and features um before we get into any solutions so first is whatever this open operating system is needs to be self-sovereign so people need to be able to bring their data in and it needs to be able to run in itself um there needs to be low-tech literacy so if you look at all of those platforms whether it was Google play or iOS um you know they're very accessible to billions of people there are five billion people that use those sorts of devices as today and it doesn't require deep technical knowledge there needs to be a consistent user experience so this is something that I think us as an industry are starting to get a little bit better at but we don't quite have all of the um I would say Design Systems thinking that web 2 has that has actually allowed for these things uh to propagate as fast as they have so two things that you may or may not be aware of unless you do a lot of front-end development but if you've seen bootstrap that actually came out of Twitter and that helped propagate social experiences across the web over the last like 10 years and it really made it easier for people to understand how to do social interactions as well as made it easier for developers to have consistent patterns that they didn't have to re-engineer themselves all the time so it's a great example there Android material design is another example where we had the inclusion of things like search and calendar into very simple consistent patterns of experiences for users to enjoy and it made it very easy for developers because they were just libraries that could be used with minor customization stations for your branding and finally Community Commerce and communication all need to be able to function in this operating system seamlessly and you see this um to varying degrees in social networks today or in super apps like WeChat and we'll talk about that in a little bit so let's talk about product requirements so those are kind of more like philosophic principles of things that we need to do it needs to be decentralized I think we've kind of established why that's very important and I think we all understand the advantages of that needs to be fully open source so somebody could go build an operating system and then another person could Fork that use it in a different region or for a different purpose it needs to work on any device this is actually a really hard problem both technically and from a design perspective so TVs computers tablets smartphones um maybe even a refrigerator right and it needs to not be monetized on ads ads create I think a difficult um incentive structure in which we're seeing play out doesn't always lead to the best user experiences for people it emphasizes attention over value for people and I think there's a lot of creative ways you can do monetization without resulting that so that leads to Super D apps right this is like these are the principles and the product features that we need to get there but first let's talk about what a super app is some of you may already know what that is some of you may not and I think it's really important to see there are a few really cool super apps in the world right now many of which we don't actually get to have in the west in the United States so the first and most iconic is WeChat um this really is a really fascinating super app it is allows you to do pretty much anything in your daily Commerce for those that are from China it's probably a daily part of your life um or for many of your friends it allows you to use Minneapolis within it it allows you to communicate into like a chat based experience paytm is in India and it actually started as like a prepaid mobile phone app and it slowly started to include a lot of different services like ride share and financial services a bunch of really cool things and gojek is in India I'm sorry Indonesia excuse me and uh it also started in the gig Services business and started to expand to many many different parts of people's lives as well but all of them have three things in common communication Commerce and some level of social network and here's some screenshots of it um so you know if you look again I think the gojek one is probably the easiest to see you can go get a ride you can go get food you can go find deals for clipping coupons where you're buying at the supermarket um you can send things to other people and there's tons and tons of different apps applets excuse me little micro applet experiences within this super app now the problem with these existing super apps as much as they've been super economically empowering for people in these countries is they're still controlled by one centralized entity and that has some uh incentive issues in which I think that super D apps could actually bring the same user experience and fix the incentive issues and I'll get into that so I think they could be even better and the main concept is an economic concept as to why super D apps would be better than super apps is a concept of comparative advantage and so just to go through this like fairly grainy image here what you have here is that if one country and you can think of a country as a company or a Dao or a project is better at producing one good so let's say you know in country B's example you see here if it only produced milk it would be able to produce eight units of milk but if it produces milk and sugar right it actually can only produce six pieces of sugar and four pieces of milk so as opposed to Country a can do 10 Goods of sugar and four Goods of milk and so if you go down that scale if you specialize in one good over another good you have a comparative advantage and then that's actually where you hope free trade comes in where countries that are best at producing milk trade for with countries that are best at producing sugar they all have lower unit economic costs and they all get more Goods now free trade is um not going as well as it used to in the last I would say 10 20 years but uh the beautiful thing about crypto and crypto economies is that everything is open source and everything is permissible and so the concept of comparative advantage for different Services can actually play out in its economic theory in the right way possible so what that means is if somebody were to create an operating system that allowed for super D apps you could have entire communities that come up with different services that have strong comparative advantages that a user would get the benefits of so what could that be as an example well you might say that the ethereum community has got the best opportunities for uh D5 right that there's a comparative advantage in doing D5 there and that's why there's the most tvl that's there right now and that you might say that and I'm giving a hypothetical that the Solana Community is actually better at nfts because they have a lot of creators from a user's perspective if they could have both Solana nfts and ethereum defy they would get the best of both worlds if it was in one super app experience and joined the comparative advantages of those two different ecosystems so really what we're saying here is is that um you know our own tribalism is actually limiting the experience of users to be able to enjoy all the benefits of the crypto economy something for us all to think about so what am I doing to help accelerate this well I am working on What's called the blockchain operating system so it's an open source operating system that near is creating and it has um basically any compatibility with any of the other blockchains and it creates a front-end layer that is not centralized if the JavaScript the HTML the CSS is all rendered and served through our validator Network our protocol and that allows for people to build experiences that are decentralized and what we want to get to is to equip people with the Frameworks and the Design Systems to be able to build their own Super apps so here's an example of what it looks like today it's on alpha.near.org and you see on the left is this component system where you can actually build these front ends and over time we're going to expand the capabilities and if you were to develop on it you can see the source code and all the dependencies of the different apps or sorry different components that make this component and you can see the full commit history by block height you can actually go back in time and render the full app based off of the block height that's there and that's really exciting because if you think about an open source front end there might be a version that you like that somebody else published in closed Source it's deprecated but in open source and to hosted on blockchain all you have to do is just rewind back in time literally a click and be able to use that version in your experience so really allows for developers to to get creative in how they build the second thing that we're building is to be able to actually have like a seamless super app experience that has low friction up front is fast off and this is allowing people through just a simple email plus a pass key using the secure Enclave of your phone in a biometric within seven or eight seconds to have a fully decentralized identity in this open source operating system okay so ultimately every super app is a two-sided Marketplace between creators and users and every operating system is the same so today we have this alpha.net org alpha.near.

org experience where users and developers can meet up to try to build out these experiences and in the future we're going to have a bunch of different you might say services like micro tasks games Commerce and finance all multi-chain and chat where people are going to be able to go and experience a super app and you would be able to Fork that super app and maybe you wanted to have your version in your country that hopefully brings more comparative advantage efficient Commerce through a simple user experience so if you want to chat about super D apps um you can connect with me um this is a QR code to my profile I'll give this for like 10 more seconds and if you're a developer and you want to go try to make a component on a front end um this is uh free storage for your first component on our blockchain operating system so cool so that's what I'm here for and thank you for your time today [Applause]