Blockchain industry must break vendor lock-in for developers’ freedom

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There is no single entity, interest group, or political group that defines (or dominates) the blockchain industry. But despite all the differences, positive and negative, there is a common mission: to achieve mass adoption.

More people, businesses, and communities around the world must benefit from crypto and blockchain technology. To fully achieve this, everyone must be able to build high-quality dApps and on-chain tools. Developers must have the freedom to express themselves in any language and on any chain. They must be able to build once and deploy anywhere.

While the recent institutional and political attention may seem exciting, it is largely driven by vested interests. As Vitalik Buterin points out, what is ‘crypto-friendly now’ does not mean it will be crypto-friendly five years from now. But good dApps are real manifestations of the principles and potential of blockchain. Once deployed, they can continue to serve the community on predefined terms enforced by censorship-resistant blockchains; ideally, even if the original creator is not there, as is the case with Bitcoin (BTC).

Therefore, the end game empowers developers (and users). No single interest or agenda, political or technological, will determine the path forward. In its purest form, crypto is an expression of freedom—freedom from intermediaries and censorship, freedom to express through code.

DApps make blockchain real and valuable

Blockchain technology must solve real, everyday problems to transition from speculative adoption to long-term mass/retail adoption. However, the recent rise in financial nihilism and meme coin adoption shows that people care more about speculation than fundamentals.

But speculation is unsustainable without real underlying value. Applications and platforms that generate value solely through fees, transaction volumes, etc. will continue to exist for another decade or more. For example, as of August 7, 2024, Uniswap had collected approximately $13 million in weekly fees, which translates to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. It appears that Uniswap (UNI)’s $4.5 billion valuation is on par with the 10x price-to-earnings ratio rule that is often applied to high-growth tech companies, and that the market has priced it in accordingly.

DApps make crypto or blockchain technology available to end users. They bring the power of immutable code to the masses without the need for intermediaries. Trading, lending, gaming, ridesharing, etc. can all happen without a single entity being able to extract value in an opaque and unfair way.

Given crypto’s roots in Bitcoin and proximity to money, finance was the first sector to be disrupted. However, the recent rise of decentralized gaming, social networks (DeSoc), physical infrastructure (DePIN), AI, etc. on cost-effective and high-throughput chains like Base or Solana shows that technology has a much broader scope than just disrupting financial products/processes.

This is why there is a growing demand in the global dApp sector, where daily unique active wallet interactions are set to reach an all-time high in Q2 2024.

Industry-specific active wallets | Source: DappRadar

Landline phones took 99 years to reach peak adoption. Cars took 78 years. But computers passed 89% adoption in 24 years. Social media and tablets achieved similar success in 14 and 7 years, respectively.

This shows how new technologies can reach majority adoption significantly quicker than their predecessors, but for this to happen, key ‘enablers’ must be in place, which could be dApps for blockchain technology.

From user-friendly graphical interfaces to making back-end components frictionless/invisible to end users, dApps are inevitable. And those who say blockchain needs more dApps and less infrastructure are quite right in this view.

Anywhere, anytime, all at once

As crypto continues to grow, many talented developers have entered the space, including some of the brightest minds from Google, Meta, IBM, etc. This includes the founding team at Aptos and Sui. As a result, great things have happened. Move rising like a phoenix from the ashes of Diem and SVM from FTX are two prime examples of a new generation of developers choosing alternatives to the EVM status quo. Reducing the barriers to dApp development is now critical to enabling more projects to emerge.

For a long time, the Ethereum Virtual Machine was the only standard available to blockchain developers. EVM, along with Solidity, was built to deploy and run custom programs on Ethereum. Similarly, there is the ‘Solana VM’ on Solana, the ‘Move VM’ on Aptos or Sui, Web Assembly on Cosmos, etc. While these are great innovations with a lot of value, they have led to fragmentation and vendor lock-in. EVM-based dApps cannot run natively on Solana, and SVM-based dApps cannot use Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, or other EVM-supported platforms.

Meanwhile, deploying dApps on multiple chains is very laborious and impractical due to high costs. First, developers need to create and maintain multiple codebases. Therefore, it takes a lot of work to achieve truly multi-chain and interoperable dApps. Projects like AAVE or Pancakeswap are exceptions because they have the resources required for multi-chain deployment. However, even for them, innovation in non-EVM code lags behind EVM code due to high costs and time requirements. Moreover, for end users, vendor lock-in means that they need to use multiple wallets and hold assets from various ecosystems because their favorite dApps, wallets, or tokens do not support the new chain they want to use.

Developers want freedom from such walled gardens for the sake of blockchain’s long-term advancement, if nothing else. They need to be able to build an application once and deliver it to users across ecosystems, asset classes, and VMs, not just one. Users have a similar need.

Abstracting wallets, chains, and even VMs is a viable solution. It allows developers to build dApps on any VM in any programming language and run them on any other chain or VM, with little to no additional cost or security vulnerabilities.

Additionally, abstracting away the underlying complexities will allow anyone to build robust dApps in a few clicks. This will change everything. Web3 will mirror the performance and speed of web2 after mass-market adoption of container technologies like Kubernetes, which helps break away from public cloud vendor lock-in. To the extent that creators can use different chains/platforms for different aspects of their dApps based on specific needs and demands, such as Solana for high-frequency transactions, Ethereum for payment finality and data availability.

Resolving vendor lock-in will improve the developer and end-user experience. Everyone can get the benefits of the underlying technology stack, and that’s the path to mass adoption. More dApps than ever before can enter the market. Not all of them will be great. But the more there are, the higher the chance of finding the next game changer.

Alejo Pinto

Alejo Pinto is the co-founder and chief growth officer of Pontem Network, a product development studio that develops Move, SVM, and EVM compatible products to enable a more developer and user-friendly web3. He has an extensive background in the technology sector and held a key role at IBM, where he gained valuable experience in blockchain applications.