We, as a community of builders, are prematurely thinking about the problem of bringing web3 to the masses. We are between 3-5 years away from a web3 product that can reach the scale of a Billion users, depending on your level of optimism.

There are 3 basic pieces of infrastructure that needs to exist before we can even think about building a product for a billion.

1. Wallets

I’ve talked about this earlier here and here.

But the core essence is that we need to get private keys into the hands of a billion users first. The big mistake we’re making is to couple asset management and credential (keys) management. By virtue of this coupling we’re inherently restricting ourselves to the DeFi Design Space. If more people have access to private keys without being bombarded with swapping and trading CTAs, the design space of what we can do with private keys will progress towards where it really needs to be. Signing data, data encryption and a variety of related flows will become possible, allowing a wider variety of products to be built.

2. Block space

We need more space on the blocks. We’re looking at 2,000 TPS using ZK rollups. It’s not enough. We need more innovation on ZK and L2s. There are low lying fruits. For example, application specific rollups/L2s. How can we have more data indexed without increasing block size? I’m talking a million TPS. Not because we need that speed to match the fiat currency counterparts, but because that will allow for more data to be accessible on chain.

We need more block space, not for transactions, but to bring more data onchain. Which brings me to point 3.

3. Oracles

If we have more blockspace, making it cheap enough for people to bring off chain data onchain, there will be more real time data on chain. As of today, the only ecosystems that really took off is the DeFi & NFT ecosystem. Both of them were self contained and didn’t need interaction with information outside their own ecosystem. The only thing most of DeFi operates is on the prices from DEXs/CEXs of other coins. It’s a closed complete ecosystem operating on just coins.

If we have more block space, more oracles can feed information on chain. Chainlink is the largest player on Oracles right now. Lot of innovation can be made on other kinds of data; what are the other incentivization mechanism for these off-chain oracles; what’s a new mechanism design that’ll encourage more builders to build oracles as a supporting system for on chain computation.

With more available data, more interesting smart contracts can be written, which operate and run truly autonomously onchain.

If you think there are other pieces of infrastructure that demand more attention, and I might have missed here, I’d like to chat @madhavanmalolan