The Risks of Overbuilding Crypto Infrastructure
The Web3 ecosystem is often regarded as the next infrastructure of the internet. However, nearly 10 years after the release of the Ethereum white paper, we have very few mainstream applications running on that infrastructure. Meanwhile, we continue to see the emergence of new infrastructure building blocks everywhere: L1, L2, and L3 blockchains, rollups, ZK layers, DeFi protocols, and many others. While we might be building the future of the internet with Web3, there is little doubt that we are overbuilding the infrastructure layer. Currently, the ratio between infrastructure and applications in Web3 has no parallels in the history of technology markets.
Why is this happening? Simply because it’s profitable to build infrastructure in…
