An essay forecasting technical and economic trends for smart-contract blockchains over the next decade, covering scalability, security, governance, and composability.
The first ten years of smart contract blockchains were born of bitcoin’s original cypherpunk values: censorship resistance, open source, permissionlessness, and a new glimmer of building a democratic/equitable internet on top of a shared world computer. Today, those ideological values are meeting with market pressure, because the mainstream market values different things: performance, cost, profitability, compliance.Powerful technologies are rarely used as intended by their creators or the early-adopter scenes. See bitcoin, the “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” vs. Bitcoin, the ETF; or USDC.As the original values of smart contract blockchains mingle with mainstream market values, it's likely that the next ten years will pull in a different direction.Many of the growing use-cases of smart contract platforms—fiat stablecoins/RWAs, open finance, many depin networks—are neither decentralized, permissionless, nor censorship resistant, but simply use the decentralization of the underlying blockchain for their openness, interoperability and settlement. Applications are also increasingly abstracting L1 cryptocurrencies, which historically have been viewed as censorship-resistant “internet money,” causing many to rethink the value proposition of the largest coins, including the base assets of next generation chains. For early-adopters, this can be difficult to reconcile. It's not what many in the scene showed up for. Does that mean it's over?I don’t think so. But it's probably the end of the beginning. In meeting the market on its values, crypto is commercializing. Commercialization, especially that of open/permissionless software, is the form-factor that takes good ideas to their largest possible audience, and thereby makes the most impact on the world. And commercialization often comes with compromises. The opportunity is to shape the nature of those compromises, and thereby, the outcome of that commercial impact. To do that, you have to drop ideological dogma, adapt