Is Decentralization Really Necessary for Every Product?
(A perspective for product builders)
Introduction
We are in a world of global disruptions. Just when you feel we have gotten a hang of one ecosystem, we receive the announcement of disruption that literally causes a frenzy in established communities. In technology especially at least this is partly the story.
Web 2.0 has been a niche everyone was comfortable with until web 3.0 became very loud recently. The idea of decentralized computing networks is not new and dates as far back as when problems around building byzantine fault-tolerant systems became increasingly popular. But with the buzz about web 3.0, one question comes to mind is decentralization even necessary for every product?
Just Build…
Today we are in a fast-paced ecosystem of startups, funding and acquisitions. One often wonders if product builders by this I mean the plethora of founders, product owners, product managers etc often stop to ask if they are launching products to solve real problems or because they want to gain traction from the ecosystem they are planning to develop in.
Building any product should begin after answering the question of necessity. And necessity is only reached by going through the route of the common “W & H” questions.
Why is this product necessary?
Who needs it?
What problem is it really solving?
How will it be relevant in the user’s everyday life?
These are age-old questions and why it is still necessary today is because the approach to problem-solving is increasingly becoming dissed. Most persons start by following a route that looks something like:
web3 is popular, how are people making money? how can I also make money? I need to just build something… what can I build in this ecosystem? I don’t really have ideas okay let me copy a solution.
So you find people competing in a frantic rat race by building multiple replicas of the same project. It is good for web3 and like the dotcom bubble, a lot of cleansing is going to happen soon. But what’s the gist of what I am trying to say?
The Main Gist
Every solution does not have to be on-boarded on the blockchain.
Every app does not need to be built on either layer1 or layer2.
A lot of times we talk about decentralization as if it is something that billions of persons out there care so much about. Well, the average user cares if their problem is being solved not which blockchain it is built on or whether it’s decentralized or not.
Decentralization as an approach to building apps of the future has unique cases where it is the best fit and as a result, it has to remain an option. We often talk about how banks are going to go away orhow decentralization will solve the problems of the world well there we go again because it will never happen. 100% complete decentralization of our entire world system. Somethings industries may(… a very big MAY) one day become really decentralized one day but not every aspect of human existence requires 100% total decentralization.
Sometimes your product will still scale and reach a broad market without having to have web3 as a tagline to attract attention. Building decentralized solutions is only a fit for very specific use cases and once your solution can pass these acid tests then we can tell if decentralization is necessary to explore as you incorporate it with web3-powered features.
Knowing if it is necessary for a product to incorporate web3 features
Knowing if building on the blockchain or an L2 service will require you to answer the following questions:
- Is it going to heavily utilize finance?
- Is transparency as a feature extremely necessary to participants using your product?
- Is accountability going to be critical? Hence a need to address your approach to governance.
- Is provable trust going to be extremely pertinent?
- Due to the sensitivity of data on the network and since it has to be transparent to all participants are you looking for a means to couple it with a means to make your data almost tamperless and immutable?
These questions determine the kind of products that one can explore building on the blockchain. If they are not all necessary it is still okay to build your normal centralized web solution. Maybe at some point, certain features of your product might begin making your team ask two or more of the previous questions and that’s where the blockchain could be introduced as a solution.
In the end, not every product has to be decentralized and decentralization is meant to serve as an option where weaknesses exists in centralized systems/solutions. Decentralization rather than being the doom of centralization will only serve to improve the way things work.
Decentralization is not a necessary feature for every product.
Thanks for the read, please follow for more
Otobong Peter
