One of the main arguments for crypto or web 3.0 is decentralization. The sad truth is most of 60 billion people out in the world don’t really care about decentralization or user-owned internet.

Decentralization as an ideology sounds cool to us the nerds, but for most people this won’t be the value add that make them onboard crypto. For crypto to truly succeed, we need to figure out what specific properties of crypto provides value that could let us make dApps that attract the next 10 billion users.

For me there are two main killer properties of crypto that could enable crypto apps for next billions of users: permissionless and data ownership.

First, permissionless. For example, Perpetual Protocol is a derivative trading exchange. But under the hood, it executes the trade on Uniswap V3. Perpetual Protocol doesn’t need to negotiate with Uniswap V3 in order to use Uniswap’s service. Try that in traditional finance, you need to negotiate with a major exchange. Most likely, they will tell you to fuck off, laughing at your ridiculous new idea. “You only have 2 guys, and you are trying to build next big derivative exchange? Maybe come back later when you have more trading volume.”

Composability is a corollary of permissionless. The fact that Uniswap is just a smart contract open to be called by anyone makes it like a primitive or so-called money lego. Huge amount of Defi projects uses other projects as building blocks, and even become primitives themselves. With so many composable primitives available, we are seeing many Defi innovations haven’t been dreamt in traditional finance before.

In fact, the DEX (Phezzan Protocol) we are building now also leverages permissionless and composability. It offers 19.45% APY while trading perpetuals on Terra. It leverages Anchor Protocol for interest generation. We just use Anchor. No permission is ever asked by Anchor.

Permissionless and composability have already facilitated dApps used by millions of people. With so many composable primitives and smart builders in the crypto space, there is no doubt there will be dApps for next billion of users.

Second, data ownership. “User owned-internet“ is a misguided marketing phrase for Web 3.0, because it can be either true or false depending on specific project. It is more accurate to say - users own the data.

Data ownership won’t attract users by itself. For most people, they don’t care about data ownership. “Facebook owns my data. Whatever.“

But user-owned data means the cost of switching to a competitor is super low. Don’t like Uniswap? Fine, just use Sushiswap. It will motivate crypto companies innovate relentlessly knowing how easy it is for its users to try a competitive service.

User-owned data also means new teams can try new projects using these data. Facebook’s largest asset is its social graph. Guess what? In crypto’s social network, anyone can build social games on top of user’s social graph, as it is owned by user, but not Facebook. This will enable so many new possibility that can’t be built in Web 2.0. Tech monopolies will no longer have final say on what can or cannot be built. Users’ data are not in their hand.

At the end of day, permissionless and user-owned data are both means to the same end - it liberates builder. Balajis famously conceptualizes blockchain as an open database where everyone has root access. I guess he left out the second half, which is more important. This gives the power back to the hand of builders. Now without the permission of established companies, we can build what we want to build. Only thing stop us from delivering the product to next 10 billion users is our imagination.