Author|Jerry
While researching the series of topics "The convenience and inconvenience that the Internet brings to users in the Web2 era and the necessity and feasibility of Web3 iterating Web2", an experience of renting a house made me feel that this should be a typical case.
The direct connection window between tenants and landlords left by the old-fashioned Internet rental platforms has disappeared in the new Internet rental platforms. A new situation is that the rental platforms and B-end customers (real estate agencies) use landlords as their core user resources, and individual tenants in the concept of large-volume users seem insignificant, just a part of the big data traffic they use to make profits.
The ACN network that Beike is proud of divides a transaction into several steps and responsible persons (for example, Li Hui is responsible for finding tenants, and the landlord is another person responsible for Li Hui), so that the brokers involved in each step can obtain corresponding income; under the ACN network, Beike's brokers are no longer in a competitive relationship, but a collaborative relationship. Through close cooperation between brokers, Beike has also achieved operational efficiency that is higher than the industry average.
However, the entire Shell does not protect the rights of users on the C-end, allowing brokers to form alliances to fully utilize the resources of landlords and make money from tenants together - how to make more money? There may be exploitation under conditions such as information asymmetry. Shell's business logic is to default or even support intermediaries to increase revenue by using "black intermediary" behavior - if the total market demand for tenants in a year is X, there will be a part of 30% of tenants who cannot tolerate houses that do not suit them and change houses, which will have to pay agency fees again, then plus the artificially created incremental market, the total market demand for a year is (1+30%)X. The details of this rental experience and the communication with Shell and the intermediary are the basis for the above judgment. Please refer to "Encountering Black Intermediaries in Shell: Where Are Their Legal Boundaries".
I once wanted to name Beike as a defendant, but I found that their behavior seemed to be beyond the legal boundaries. For Internet platforms, we can only hope to "do no evil" (Do not be evil is the slogan of the old Internet company Google), but it is obvious that Beike and some companies in the Internet+ era will not make such self-requirements; then we can also hope for the governance of government regulatory departments, but the governance of the Internet industry is much more complicated than that of traditional industries. It is often difficult to find matching governance rules for the problems encountered by individual users; then, we can also hope that good applications will appear in the process of Web3 iterating Web2 to replace Beike and some companies in the Internet+ era.
We briefly review several early examples of Web3 iterating over Web2:
1. Farcaster is a decentralized social network that can correspond to Twitter of Web2. Farcaster can support open protocols of many clients. Users can freely migrate social identities between applications, and developers can freely build applications with new functions on the network. On Farcaster, you can send short text message broadcasts and connect your Ethereum address. After verifying the ownership of the address, a series of special features can be enabled, including displaying your NFT, using NFT as a verified avatar, etc. Farcaster is a social network that concerns "personal interests". It is not only what you say, but also what you can prove on the chain. In addition to Farcaster, this type of Web3 iteration also includes Lens, Cyberconncet, Damus, etc. The goal of this type of application is to revolutionize centralized social networking. The slogan is "Twitter killer" and "WeChat killer". It intends to build a social network belonging to Web3 from scratch.
2. Friend-Tech (hereinafter referred to as "FT") is a phenomenal application that many people have been discussing recently. Unlike applications such as Farcaster, FT retains the original social resources of users as much as possible. This may also be an important reason for the success of FT - we can also understand it as a transitional product from Web2 to Web3 iteration. This track is also bursting with vitality - Post.Tech, located on the Arbitrum blockchain, has cloned Friend.Tech in terms of functions and business models. It currently has a daily transaction volume of US$1.8 million (September 21), of course, this is still far lower than Friend.Tech's US$20 million.
3. Sound.xyz is an NFT music NFT company. Sound.xyz focuses on the first release of works by Web 3 musicians. Artists who release music through Sound.xyz can generate NFTs on the platform to promote their works. When users buy NFTs, they have collected the music. They can listen to it directly without downloading it, and can also make public comments. Its corresponding Web2 product is similar to Apple Music.
4. Mirror is similar to Medium, but it is on-chain and can help creators crowdfund by providing them with token issuance tools. Anyone can connect their wallet to Mirror and start writing.
5. ArDrive is a blockchain-based permanent storage application that can store texts, articles, photos, and videos. Google Drive and others may be affected by data leaks, but ArDrive allows users to maintain ownership and control of their data on the Arweave blockchain.
Based on the progress of Web3 infrastructure and the development of intention narrative, the market is more confident than ever about the arrival of the Web3 application era. In the past week (September 15-September 22), ten Web3 application projects received financing, and the main investment institutions included a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, etc.
Among them, Fuze completed a $14 million seed round of financing. Fuze enables banks, fintech companies or enterprises to provide regulated digital asset products to customers through native applications; Bastion received a $25 million seed round of financing led by a16z crypto. They are seeking to overcome the barriers for traditional companies to enter the new decentralized Internet version based on blockchain, namely "web3"; Bubblemaps completed a $3.2 million (3 million euros) seed round of financing, focusing on blockchain data visualization; Topic.Market announced the completion of a $2 million strategic round of financing. Topic.Market is both a social platform and a trading platform that allows users to independently create cryptocurrency themes and set pricing mechanisms, and then invest based on community interests...
Now, we try to analyze and iterate the product of Shell Rental in the context of Web3 application: First, it should be decentralized. In the decentralized Web3, Shell's core ACN network will disappear, because the ACN network is tailor-made for intermediaries (brokers), which is revolutionary for the Web2 Shell business model. It is highly likely that it will not take the initiative to iterate its applications. This iteration will occur in the Web3 native application market; secondly, we must provide a systematic guarantee for the legitimacy (fairness) of user transactions and the rights and interests between users, such as borrowing the concept of fraud proof from the OP system to use economic means to stimulate Challenger to check the legitimacy of transactions, and borrowing ZK PROOF to prove that the transaction has been correctly executed off-chain (layer 2)... The emergence of Web3 applications in the rental market may take another period of time, especially compared with Web3 social networking, the Web3 applications in the trading market are still in a much earlier stage. However, through the narrative of intentional transactions, practitioners with more in-depth experience in this field can provide us with a mirror:
Anoma proposed the architecture of intent in the white paper published in August last year: Intent Gossip Layer is used to spread intent, discover counterparties and match execution paths. Anoma was initially developed based on Tendermint and used the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism, and then turned to the PoS Proof of Stake consensus mechanism "Typhon" to allow consensus division between independent chains. To realize the architectural vision of Intent-Centric, programmable algorithm structure and discovery of counterparties are indispensable functions, which need to be built on the basis of multi-interaction and multi-application.
1. Privacy payment
To protect user privacy and prevent others from collecting data retroactively, the sender, receiver, amount, and asset denomination are encrypted, and the transfer of funds is guaranteed by zero-knowledge proof zk-SNARKs - allowing all assets to share the same shielded pool (MASP) to provide composable asset protection and increase user anonymity sets;
2. Barter
Bartering is the exchange of goods without a medium of exchange and does not involve the receipt or payment of cash. Anoma implements a digital bartering program that facilitates the exchange of goods, services, or digital representations of value;
3. Intent matching system
In Ethereum EVM, transactions do not enforce future states but authorize specific execution paths, while Anoma includes a matching system that allows users to broadcast transaction intentions using Gossip;
4. Multi-chain support for Anoma
Use the Cosmos ecosystem’s inter-chain communication IBC protocol for inter-blockchain communication. IBC uses relays to achieve data transmission between different blockchains and aims to become a multi-chain privacy layer;
5. Fractal Scaling and Expansion Solution
Anoma uses a fractal solution to solve the scalability problem of blockchain, allowing users to create local instances to meet other transaction needs. Fractal refers to dividing Anoma into different application chains to handle different tasks, so that each Anoma application chain can be highly customized to achieve scale and cope with user growth.
