philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Announcing Sui

By Rob Tercek on Facebook

For seven or eight years we've been hearing about Web3 and decentralized apps. It is all still a work in progress. Today most dApps are cumbersome, with a pretty poor consumer experience. A lot of that can be attributed to the underlying infrastructure. This is changing, finally. Last year $30 billion of venture funding was invested in decentralized infrastructure. We should be seeing some signficant improvements in these platforms this year. For instance, I found this announcement about Mysten Labs and SUI to be interesting. This project was started by the team that developed Libra crytocurrency inside Facebook. When that project came to an end, this team spun out and started something fresh. Their goal is to build a blockchain platform that does not suffer from the many obvious defects of the current generation of dApp platforms. This is interesting. If you have been following Web3, no doubt you are familiar with the kneejerk reaction among crypto-haters that goes like this: "blockchain is environmentally unfriendly and it will destroy the planet." Peer past the hyperbole, and what you are left with is a luddite view based on the (incorrect) assumption that no improvement in blockchain consensus mechanisms is possible. In 2022 we will see most of the major blockchain platforms (not bitcoin) make substantial improvements in efficiency and scalability, at the cost of only minor reductions in security. So in my view now is an excellent time to be rethinking this Luddite view. Instead of saying, "blockchain bad, blockchain inefficient" maybe now it is a good time to get smart about what might be possible if a very efficient, scalable, fast blockchain platform were available. This Medium article shares links to many exciting scenarios and examples, including dynamic NFTs, new kinds of games, loyalty programs, smart coupons, on-chain defi, and other advances in smart contracts. Disclosure: I have no stake in Mysten or SUI and I don't know anyone there. I am not flogging crypto and I currently hold no NFTs. So I am not a cheerleader for this stuff. Just a guy who is trying to get a glimpse of what the rest of this decade will look like. Articles like these, and the discussions that follow, are a good way to get into that.

Read the Medium post he references here: https://medium.com/mysten-labs/announcing-sui-1f339fa0af08