A few years back, the “Appchain” thesis was raging in our ecosystem. The main idea was that there would be a chain for social networks (👋 Farcaster), one for trading (👋 Uniswap Chain), one for NFT trading, one for a specific game… etc. This was appealing because blockchains, by design, can’t scale enough to host more than a few very popular applications…
I now realize this was wrong, because “apps” in the crypto world are not what people expect. In fact, all computing platforms saw the emergence of a different kind of app. The desktop computer fathered the “software application” (and its siblings freeware and shareware!), the web fathered “websites”, mobile devices re-invented “apps”…
For the crypto/blockchain world, the answer has been right under our eyes since day 1: the “apps” are assets! 🤯 Bitcoin is the blockchain for the bitcoin asset! I posit that the correct framing for Appchains is in fact “AssetChains”.
If we push a little further, we realize that blockchains are in fact native marketplaces for specific assets, where they settle: bitcoin can be traded on Coinbase or on Ethereum (as wBTC), but it’s eventually settled on the Bitcoin chain. On many blockchains, we see the emergence of applications to interact with the asset of that specific chain, creating network effects! Want to borrow against your ETH? Use Morpho on Ethereum or Base.
Last week, Circle launched Arc… the USDC chain. My bet is that this will lead to their Gateway product moving onchain. Earlier in July, we saw the Robinhood chain take off, with “stock” tokens (you can trade tokenized representations of AAPL, TSLA or GOOG). The volumes are still low, but I bet eventually the tokenized stocks will see greater volumes than the traditional markets, especially as the blockchain’s bricks will allow for all kinds of financial products using them, from margin trading, etc. The RWA trend is only beginning, but just like software is eating the world, crypto will eventually eat every financial market!
At Relay, we obviously bet on the fact that every asset in the world will move onchain. We know that this can’t (and won’t) be a single chain, but we also believe nobody will want to deal with the complexity that this inevitably creates. Just like Google embraced a world with millions (billions!) of websites by creating an abstraction layer that indexes them all, we are building the abstraction layer to buy, sell, exchange, pay with any asset on any chain.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn.