Future of the dApps: insights from founding engineer @ Cartesi, Felipe Argento
Are Layer 2 solutions going to die out?
GM and happy Monday frens🖖
This week's newsletter is insights from our podcast with Felipe Argento, founding engineer @ Cartesi, an application-specific roll-up protocol with a Linux runtime. We talked about EVMs vs alternative VMs, Web3 gaming, and the difficulties of bringing new people into the industry.
Be sure to listen to the podcast on all platforms:
While you're here, take a little sneak peek:
— Have you noticed that there are more successful infrastructure companies in the industry than end-user dApps?
I think that makes sense in the current state of the industry. The tools and the infrastructure are still very difficult to interact with. So there are a lot of barriers to actually building a cool, easy-to-use UX application. Most of the applications are aimed at developers because they require a certain level of knowledge. So the infrastructure is there to solve that. But ultimately it has to be used for something.
Deep dive into ETH Infrastructure in Istanbul
We’re having a one-day event dedicated to Ethereum infrastructure during Devconnect, in Istanbul, on November 15!
🎤Speakers and panelists:
Nebojsa Urosevic — Co-Founder SVP of R&D @ Tenderly
Brecht Devos — Co-Founder @ Taiko
Dmitry Zhelezov — Co-Founder @ Subsquid
Vince Yang — Co-Founder @ zk.Link
Brandon Truong — Co-Founder @ ZetaChain
Bogdan Habic — CTO @ Tenderly
Raul Jordan — Founder @ Prysm & Senior Software Engineer @ Offchain Labs
DJ Lee — CTO & Founder @ Kroma
And many more great speakers
🧠We are organizing curated networking with Web3 experts. Prepare to get consultations from 15 industry experts. You'll have the opportunity to pick their brains, collaborate on ideas, or simply expand your network in 15-minute sessions!
☄️The event is free, but the number of seats is limited! If you want to get a guaranteed seat — book a ticket:
— Do you think we are technically ready for mass adoption of dApps or do we need more time to build the infrastructure?
It depends on the type of application you're building. We can already do a lot of cool things with DeFi. But there's a whole range of applications that are not DeFI that are currently excluded from benefiting from the Web3 ethos, like censorship resistance, security, decentralization, and so on.
They're excluded for two main reasons:
The first is that they can't afford to pay high fees because you're going to scare away your user base.
The second is tooling. For example, there's a game called Topology. It uses the same physics as Angry Birds. But they had to rebuild the whole physics model from scratch because there was no tooling for it. On the contrary, when the Angry Birds developers went to build Angry Birds, they just imported the physics library that was already there. So it takes a while to get to the point where the same tools and capabilities we have for Web2 are available for Web3.
— How do you see the future of the Layer 2 landscape? How many Layer 2 solutions do we need and how many will survive?
If the solutions are different enough, they will survive. But I can't really say, "We're only going to have three different ZK EVMs”. Maybe, I don't know. Will they be able to differentiate enough? Usually, there's a huge network effect: if you get all the developers and users on the same framework, then those developers and users not only create this community around the framework, but they also make tools and improve and test and document and so on.
So I think we're going to have different protocols, but it's hard to have a lot of different ones for the same niche.
— What are the best practices for bringing developers to all this infrastructure?
I think that's what we're trying to figure out. I hope coming to podcasts is a good way to do that. So if you're reading this and you're a developer, please jump on our Discord. We do all of our development and research there in public.
My personal belief is that hackathons, improving the tooling and the documentation, being friendlier, and so on, it is like fostering a community.
Wanna listen to the full version and learn more about EVMs, Web3 games, and Layers2? Click the button below to listen to the podcast on all platforms:
All right, that’s it for today! 👋 But wait…
You didn’t say “gm” on Twitter! Let’s catch up there for daily insights.
Sending growth your way,
Epic Web3