Decentralized app stores may lead to more centralized encryption

estimated Windfall Apple received $67 billion from its App Store in 2020. This is an increase from $50 billion in 2019, an increase of 28%. Although the company has reduced its commissions for small developers, the App Store is still a major part of Apple’s profits.It’s not just that Apple gets a share of the developer’s revenue: on Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, the Google Play Store Mesh In 2020, it will be 38.6 billion U.S. dollars.

The total revenue from the top two app stores exceeds 105 billion U.S. dollars. No wonder regulators in many countries are closely considering whether there is enough competition in the market. Therefore, it is not surprising that Coinbase, the most famous and well-known cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, also wants to become the most well-known cryptocurrency exchange in the world. The entrance to the decentralized application economy.

But when we replace one janitor with another, what do we sacrifice? Will it jeopardize the decentralization and accessibility of everything that is sacred to many cryptocurrency believers? These are all important issues worth discussing, because we will continue to advance our momentum and push it further into the mainstream.

related: Decentralization and Centralization: Where is the future?Expert answers

80/20 rule

Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 rule is correct: 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers. However, as far as Apple’s App Store is concerned, it is more like the 95/2 rule: 95% of revenue comes from the top 2% of apps.

Let us assume that decentralized application (DApp) stores will reflect a similar reality, with the most successful applications generating the most revenue. This means that any DApp store that manages to protect the most popular applications will have a huge advantage. The most well-funded platforms will spend money lavishly to gain exclusive and secure gatekeeper status. Then, anyone who wants to access the top application needs to go through that gatekeeper.

The monopoly element of any app store makes the economy so profitable. If you own the track, you own the profit-it’s that simple.

But the 80/20 rule should not be extended to Web 3.0 economics. Not to make huge profits for a few people, but to benefit more people, because users participate in the governance, growth, maintenance, and daily operations of their favored ecosystem. The ownership aspect of the Web 3.0 economy distributes rewards more evenly to ecosystem participants based on their contributions. This is a more balanced dynamic and proposes a new way of doing business.

related: Is the new decentralized Internet or Web 3.0 possible?

Build a Web 3.0 DApp store

How to ensure the real decentralized distribution of DApp? We need a DApp store that meets the following conditions:

• Governance-First, a DApp store will be operated by the community. A decentralized autonomous organization is needed to vote on all governance issues, such as commissions, security, etc.
• Ownership-profits will be distributed to communities according to their governance structure. Funds need to be reserved for the organization to manage application verification, protect the system, and maintain the community.
• Tokenomics-an opportunity to do something very interesting around incentivizing developers to use the platform exclusively and perform other key tasks (such as supporting distribution infrastructure and other basic technologies).
• Interoperability-Users should be able to move freely between different DApp stores and carry their applications (and their data) with them. It is impossible not to have a DApp store to rule all of these.

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Applications are the center of the digital economy, and this will continue to exist as we move towards Web 3.0. Access to decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, and other emerging digital assets requires mobile access points to bridge the gap between those who own laptops and those who only access the Internet through mobile devices.

We are in the transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. Although gatekeepers are still in an advantageous position, they will continue to pursue user growth and decentralized protocols that find access points for new users.

When we actually transition to Web 3.0, we are likely to see DApp serving smaller market segments than today. We will see a vibrant DApp ecosystem, which is more focused and developed by a compact team.

related: How NFT, DeFi and Web 3.0 are intertwined

We will also see that the application is deconstructed into components. For example, a decentralized exchange will be deconstructed into several levels: user-oriented front-end, aggregator back-end, and liquidity provider as infrastructure. It is similar to the evolution of “monolithic to microservice” in the software cloud infrastructure space.

There is no real decentralization in terms of applications, we just replace one gatekeeper with another. The key here will be the community’s commitment to supporting various application store gateways.

what is the relationship?

The risk is that in our inevitable journey into the mainstream, convenience and ease of use will trump decentralization. In fact, this is often the reason for the emergence of centralized gatekeepers: they make things less complicated, which in turn makes things more accessible to the public.

As the crypto community works together to build a prosperous digital asset economy that benefits most people, we must all keep these trade-offs in mind. We absolutely must make digital assets easy to understand and access, and at the same time refute any argument that concentrating power in the hands of a few people is a fast path to the mainstream that is worth weighing in.

We can — and should — work to protect what makes our shared vision so powerful: a future accessible to all.

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