I’d say if you’re a young engineer excited about web3, make sure you ask what problem you’re solving – Bharath Ramsundar
I’m finding it hard to be excited about web3. For context, I worked on web3 engineering for a few years at my last startup. At the time it was hard, slow work. Things have improved some, but the primary use case is still financial.
I recently had to do a wire transfer to Japan using traditional finance, which was far more painful than crypto so I think there are some genuine use cases. But I think the web3 hype is ahead of reality. It’s still not clear to me what real world life improvements crypto offers
A lot of the gains are fluffy. On an old wallet I did some Uniswap swaps for which I was apparently rewarded something like $10K on th airdrop. I lost the wallet key but had like 5 people reach out asking me for “finders fees” for telling me about my tokens
I feel like it’s a bit of a shell game. VC early money, some true believers, and now larger down stream adopters. But there’s still not a real world product. Amazon shipped you real books. Web3 hasn’t yet crossed a real world divide. It’s just tokens and NFTs all the way down
I’d say if you’re a young engineer excited about web3, make sure you ask what problem you’re solving. There are plenty of hard down to earth engineering problems elsewhere (we work on some @deepforestsci).
A lot of DeFi comes down to regulatory arbitrage. Regulators haven’t entirely caught up to the new tech so there’s a hole early players are using to break into the financial markets. Which isn’t wrong as a tactic for company building.
But I question if many of today’s crypto systems can solve or even help with hard questions like climate change, supply chains, and geopolitical conflicts.
