A common narrative in the Web 3.0 community is that we are in an infrastructure phase and the right thing to be working on right now is building out that infrastructure: better base chains, better interchain interoperability, better clients, wallets and browsers

The rationale is: first we need tools that make it easy to build and use apps that run on blockchains, and once we have those tools, then we can get started building those apps.

We are not in an infrastructure phase, but rather in another turn of the apps-infrastructure cycle

history of new technologies shows that apps beget infrastructure, not the other way around.

It’s not that first we build all the infrastructure, and once we have the infrastructure we need, we begin to build apps.

A big part of why this is even a topic of conversation is that everyone now knows that “platforms” are often the largest value opportunities (true for Facebook, Amazon/AWS, Twilio, etc.) — so there is naturally a rush to build a major platform that captures value.

even more true in the distributed web where value often — but not always — accrues in the protocol layer rather than the applications that sit on top.

platforms evolve from an iterative cycle of apps=>infrastructure=>apps=>infrastructure and are rarely built in an outside vacuum.

First, apps inspire infrastructure. Then that infrastructure enables new apps.