I finally decided. I finally decided to resign from my role at my current company where I had invested my time, energy, and emotions quite a lot. I’d be losing the opportunity to hold on to most of my stock options as a founding engineer on the team. However, despite my most sentimental inclinations not to do so, everything about this movie feels right. I‘m ready to make a huge bet on something new and as I always do, I’m going all in. I have monitored the chatter for a while and I have done a ton of research and I can feel it in my bones that the world is changing. I have the opportunity I missed before yet again. The opportunity to get in on the ground floor, aggressively challenge me, and be one of the ushers of this new era(the church should have taken me while they could).

My first introduction to anything Web 3.0 happened as far back as November 2016. To be honest, it wasn’t much of an introduction. Bitcoin was all the rave and we had all fallen for the promise of making more money when its value rises. “Buy Low, Sell High” (BLSH) was the order of the day. Moreso, pyramid schemes were springing up and disappearing into thin air here and there. So much that to the average person like myself, cryptocurrency was strongly associated if not synonymous with fraudulent financial activity(I eventually learned that this was by design).

A few months after I was privileged to be a part of Mark Essien’s(CEO, Hotels.ng), Hotels.ng Internship(HNG) where I managed to stand out a bit. I ended up not following the program to the end, but some good things did come from it. One of which was been opportune to work with Mark Essien and a couple of other really smart folks to explore the idea of governance on the blockchain. I have tried hard to remember the name, but I sadly can’t(Future me remembered, it was called CitizenOne). All I remember is the bright yellow-themed design which I’m sure I have somewhere. While I wasn’t a part of the core components of the project at the time, it was enough to spark interest in me. And yes, I also didn’t see that to the end. Quite a habit you know? A bad one? Maybe. I often delude myself into accepting that I’m an iterator and I rapidly move through things sticking with the few that stick naturally and challenge me significantly. Oh well, I digress.

Moved by the feeling that this “blockchain thing” would become a major thing someday, I decided to pay for Udacity’s Blockchain Developer Nanodegree Program some months after that. Broke me spending so much money on this. I breezed through the content at the time without much understanding, but I got to play around and at least develop a better understanding of how things worked. In the years that followed I focused fully on my career as a software engineer as well as building side projects. The only interaction I was comfortable having with/on the blockchain was BLSH. Thank you BuyCoins.

More recently, however, I have redeveloped a stronger interest in the potential of Blockchain technology and the “Web3” era as most people call it. So I decided to do what I do whenever I’m looking to truly learn anything. I decided to set myself ablaze with all things Web3 and the Blockchain, such that whenever I do decide to rise, I’ll rise like a Phoenix with a deep understanding of how things work and the context to distinguish truly practical use cases from the shiny stuff.

I’m a pretty logical guy. Actually, not true. I’m emotional AF. However, when I make decisions, I try my best to think things from every angle I can possibly conceive to ensure I’m not missing anything. It’s often overwhelming but remains an invaluable thing. So let’s be skeptical for a bit. Here are some of the things I have seen in this space that worry me.

Future me: Some of these I now have a much better understanding of and have developed more refined perspectives around, but I have decided to leave the article as-is for the sake of preserving my thoughts and feelings at the time.

Everyone’s talking about it and in Technical Jargons

For most things, I consider it a bad sign when everyone is excited by it. I have listened to “knowledgeable folks” discuss Web3 and the Blockchain and I have rarely ever come out of it with anything new or some unknown insight. It seems as though everyone is intoxicated by this new thing for its ability to take them to the moon(make them rich) and they won’t stop talking loud, though not saying much. It makes me cringe and want to run in the opposite direction. However, I think it also signals an opportunity for the few folks who will dig deeper and genuinely gain an understanding of things.

Scams

I don’t even need to say much about this one. I know it, you know it, we know it. Rug pulls have become the order of the day.

Sustainability/Environmental issues

There’s a lot of chatter about the inability to scale blockchain technology without causing major damage to the environment. While I’m not the most conscious person when It comes to such matters, I’m also not reckless and I think something with such issues would have a hard time scaling.

Terrible UX — People do not want to manage so many complexities

Every crypto app I have used up until now has been significantly more complicated than its Web2.0 counterparts. Makes me wonder if this is just some “we are smart engineers” tech or would slowly permeate the lives of the masses. The journey to getting there looks like a very drawn-out one, but I see potential all the same.

Stagnation in DAOs. Decentralization is chaotic

I love the idea of DAOs. I always have. I find it liberating because every time I have tried to design equitable systems from scratch I have always come up with ideas that are pretty similar to those modeled in a DAO. I think I’d have fun exploring the potential of DAOs. However, I also worry that decentralization is chaotic and I have since seen several DAOs suffer from this. Eventually resulting in stagnation of some sort and an inability to iterate quickly.

Web3 signals the digitization of human experiences

This one hits home. One of the things that worries me most about many recent inventions/innovations we’ve made is the fact that we are seeking/finding ways to automate/digitize typically human experiences. Clearly, there are pros to this, but I wonder how much we’ve reflected on the cons. It’s not looking good to me and I’ll explain further in subsequent notes.

Thinking more optimistically, there are some unignorable pros to this new technology/era and these are some areas I’m specifically interested in diving into.

• What problem does the blockchain/web3 attempt to solve and how well does it solve it?

• What problems does it create?

• While most people are fascinated by the moon shot tokens, meme coins, and whatnot, what other mostly ignored industries can truly benefit from this technology or a variation of it?

• As a creator, I’m particularly obsessed with the creator economy too and

• I think my experience in building tech products puts me in a unique position to apply my learnings in solving major problems that plague the creator. As of now, I am looking to do this in the areas of building community, monetization of creative skills/work, and overall governance or control of platforms built on the back of creators. We’ll see what this morphs into over time.

The blockchain provides a massive opportunity in building scalable digital communities like never before as well as ridding several industries of dictatorial middlemen who have long enjoyed control over us in ways that are significantly unjust.

There are more benefits to be listed here and I’d probably dive into those subsequently. This is just me sharing the things that excite me most right now.

I’ve been spending my time monitoring the trends both in conversation and through quantitative analysis and reports on internet adoption and human interaction. I’m convinced it’s time.

And it’s not the hype for me. I am very well aware of some major constraints that’d prevent some of these ideas from going mainstream(without further innovation) and I’ll write about that at some point. But for now, I’m doing my best to effectively navigate the noise and seek the meat of the action. In other words, understand the meaning and impact of things at the root level for two main reasons:

I’m a huge proponent of understanding things from the first principle. If you’re not sure what that is, here’s a less technical way to describe it. It is the act of understanding things from the basics. Starting with the foundational ideas/concepts/assumptions that set the stage for every other aspect of a subject. You can learn more about it here. When learning to code roughly 5 years ago, I fell in love with understanding the basics of programming with JavaScript. I would spend several hours breaking down popular libraries and revisiting “the hard parts” in order to make sure I understood the bigger picture down to the details and was able to effectively separate signal from noise. That is what is actually valuable from what looks valuable.

The second reason I’m taking such a plunge into working with the blockchain and web3 is the amount of technical jargon in the space. For something that is meant to transform so many lives and industries, the blockchain is still talked about in really complex ways and explained using technicalities that the average person should not need to care about. Honestly, It’s pretty new and we are all still trying to get the hang of it, so that’s bound to happen. That’s also significantly responsible for the terrible UX you may have noticed in many Web 3.0 experiences as well as your friend’s inability to explain things to you without you dosing off(No, it’s not your fault). Going off the principle that true knowledge of something reflects in your ability to explain it simply and using relatable analogies, I’m hoping this is something I can contribute to fixing by truly understanding things at a deeper level and then sharing that journey/knowledge via various media.

Also, in a bid to force me to learn faster and from people who are in the middle of it all I will be dedicating myself to studying and applying to core blockchain companies where I could make my exploration of this space my daily routine. Even more, fun as I’d be able to directly apply some of these ideas in building Creathor(you’ll know what this is soon enough). Lots of experiments to run. Is this my mad scientist phase?

As usual, I’ll share more learnings and thoughts around this going forward. Best regards.