After I hosted this weblog on Amazon Net Companies, I used 5 merchandise. I paid for them every in US {dollars} each month. One bill.
Suppose I needed to rebuild my website on web3 utilizing totally decentralized elements. I’d pay every product supplier in their very own token: one for storage, compute, caching/CDN, electronic mail subscription administration, and many others. Tokens reward the validators and the stakers powering the decentralized networks.
Paying 5 decentralized suppliers in 5 totally different tokens means managing a number of wallets and monitoring token costs to hedge bills. That’s way more work than the automated bank card cost with AWS. It’s an excessive amount of complexity for a easy static weblog.
Builders constructing refined functions make use of 10, 20, perhaps 30 companies. Are you able to think about a website reliability engineer managing 15 to twenty tokens, coordinating with finance groups to make sure correct treasury administration, whereas guaranteeing excessive uptime?
It’s laborious to think about such a situation enjoying out. As a substitute, three potentialities are extra possible.
First, the ecosystem decides that infrastructure funds ought to happen in stablecoins – like USDC or UST. This absolves prospects from a lot of the challenges of managing varied tokens.
Second, the quickest rising web3 infrastructure gamers parlay their tokens as an ecosystem reserve foreign money, a petrodollar for gigabytes. Builders pay for low-latency storage with the identical protocol token as they’d pay for compute. Maybe this dynamic drives consolidation out there, paralleling the web2 infrastructure hypermarts of AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Third, software program engineers decentralize solely a subset of the app. Migrate the database (blockchain) and the file system to make sure on-chain asset possession survives the corporate. The remaining a part of the stack stays on web2.
How this quandary resolves will decide probably the most engaging locations to construct new infrastructure startups.
