DGM

A great crypto thesis: @Solana will disrupt @Apple, @Samsung, @google and cloud service providers @Microsoft and @amazon Yes, that’s right. I’m not talking about Ethereum, Polygon, Cardano, Avalanche, Hedera, or any other chain. And no, I’m not talking about the Saga phone. I’m talking about the world of software applications. I think Solana in particular will be the crypto winner in this domain by a wide margin. Let’s talk about why… The application layer Imagine you buy a new phone. It doesn’t matter which brand, but imagine that this phone costs you $1000, and it’s better than an iPhone. Way better. It’s loaded up with all the apps you expect, but they are better than the Apple equivalents. The calendar/to-do apps are all built by third parties, so you can pick which ones you like the most, but they all integrate seamlessly together. They can share your data between them. Want to switch to a new calendar app? Just download it, and you don’t even need to migrate your data to the new app. It’s already there when you open the app. Now imagine you open your navigation app, and all those calendar events are loaded into it, and it offers a screen that tells you the estimated commute times for each event location. No app integrations necessary. Not only that, but you can open a random restaurant recommendation app, and an AI model will look at your travel patterns, grocery preferences, and pre-existing eating habits, and automatically recommend 10 new restaurants that you’re going to love. But you’re feeling more adventurous, and you speak to it, saying, “I was actually thinking about trying out Himalayan food, preferably not too expensive” and it produces a nice (probably small) list of options. You say, “schedule a date with my wife for tomorrow at that second one on the list,” and it creates a calendar event, invites your wife (who uses a totally different calendar app), and makes the reservation for you. Now imagine that all of this happens without any centralized entity collecting your personal data. It’s all encrypted and it all lives on the Solana blockchain. Not only that, but all the apps are super cheap and usually free. The only catch is that you spend about $3/month on SOL that you need in order to use these apps. How is this possible? Well, the entire point of blockchains is to have a globally shared state that can be accessed by anyone at any time. Imagine if all the Web2 tech companies shared a single database and could integrate all their apps together to give you a seamless user experience across all of them. Solana enables that. With this type of system, we don’t need those big tech companies collecting “platform rent.” Individual companies lose their network effect when the network is global, permissionless, and open-source. Now the companies building applications will need to focus less on building a huge moat of personal data capture & exclusive “walled gardens” of applications, and will instead focus more on delivering great user experiences. They won’t be able to rest on their laurels because they have all their users locked in. Users can’t be locked in if their data is freely available to competing apps. The friction of switching to a new app becomes nonexistent. The underlying tech Let’s talk about the technical reasons that Solana not only meets these requirements, but is also the most likely candidate to dominate this use case. To do all of these seamless app integrations, you can’t be constantly splitting up that state onto multiple shards and rollup chains. Instead, you really need a single integrated blockchain that holds all the state on-chain. Obviously you can get away with using multiple layers of chains, but that’s way more complicated for developers and potentially the end users. We want simplicity and ease, so a monolithic blockchain is ideal. As much as admire Ethereums history, Ethereum’s model is far less than ideal.