Devcon VI Watch List for Content and Social Applications

刘果 | Guo Liu (@guo) from Matters

Curated topics for builders and investors looking at Web3 content ecosystem and social media.

In the recent Devcon VI @ Bogotá, I learned about the progress of the Ethereum ecosystem from the angle of rebuilding the content ecosystem and social media. And here is a watch list I curated on the relevant topics. Most of them are talks, and some of them are relevant resources discussed.

I organized the topics according to two axes: the content creation - consumption flow, and the application - infrastructure spectrum. These are rough coordinates, but helpful in identifying bottlenecks and breakthroughs in a content ecosystem.

Topics related to Web3 content ecosystem and social media.

For applications that are driving mass adoption of Web3, the biggest two bottlenecks have been gas fee and wallet interaction. The former is not yet solved since layer2s with ZK technology are still in their infancy, but slide-chains such as Polygon can be a temporal solution. Wallet interaction, including private key management, can be simplified by account abstraction. From this Devcon, it seems account abstraction is almost production ready.

For truly decentralized applications, there are two more challenges. One is the light client, allowing applications to interact with blockchains without centralized providers. It seems light clients are still far from maturity and adoption. The other one is the economic model to facilitate social coordination and reward contribution, which is context-specific and needs to be experimented with by applications. There are general ideas discussed in this direction, such as pluralism and different forms of quadratic funding/voting, but no concrete examples are seen.

Smart Contract Wallet / Account Abstraction

Storage

Light client

Zero Knowledge

Layer 2

Cross-chain

Economics

Implementation & Security

Application in the social context

Social Coordination

UX