Framework Ventures: What Will the Crypto Market Look Like in 2030?

Original Authors: Vance Spencer, Michael Anderson

Original Title: 《FV III: The End of The Beginning》

Compiled by: Gu Yu, Chain Catcher

Introduction: Today, Framework Ventures announced the completion of a $400 million fund "FVIII" aimed at investing in early-stage blockchain games, Web3, and DeFi startups and networks. Currently, Framework Ventures manages approximately $1.4 billion in assets, making it one of the most successful venture capital firms in the crypto industry.

At the same time, Framework Ventures also published an article envisioning the Crypto market in 2030, predicting that the industry will have 1 to 3 billion daily active users and a total TVL exceeding $10 trillion. Below is a partial compilation of the original text by Chain Catcher:

The belief guiding FVIII is that we are on the brink of explosive growth in consumer blockchain applications. We firmly believe that the products being built today will open the floodgates for billions of new users over the next decade and become the next software leaders. Nearly a decade of technological maturation, iteration, and failures has prepared blockchain for consumers, and we believe it is finally here. Developer tools will shorten build times from years to months, blockchain has expanded across multiple chains with transaction fees below 20 cents, and wallets have improved to accommodate over a billion users. Blockchain technology has finally caught up to meet demands that were only hypothetical until recently.

The increasing demand for blockchain space comes from users in large end markets such as gaming, content, and commerce. Developers have shifted their focus from overcoming infrastructure barriers to building applications that people genuinely want to use, thus fostering industry growth. Today, blockchain's MAU (Note: Monthly Active Users) is approximately 30 million, growing about 54 times since 2020, as users experiment with primitive social networks, gaming, and fintech. To illustrate the scale of the industry, OpenSea now indexes more NFTs than Google has web pages, the total value locked in DeFi has surpassed $200 billion, and Ethereum has consumed 2.1 million ETH in fees over the past nine months. Suddenly, Crypto has evolved from a niche industry for enthusiasts into an emerging industry with real user bases and a vibrant ecosystem.

Through this growth, we collectively discover that blockchain is an appealing business model for most (if not all) digital markets, while the strongest existing Web2 enterprises are merely monotonous markets. Entrepreneurs are drawn to Crypto because it offers them a legitimate advantage against these existing enterprises through composability, tokens, and wallets. Founders of the new era understand that the native monetization of open-source technology is a significant breakthrough, allowing for the establishment of new economic relationships between developers and users on the blockchain. There is also a sense that building in a space where not all decisions have been made and walled gardens established is exciting.

With all this momentum, it raises the question: where will we be in 2030?

A significant shift in technology or investment begins when a new type of computer is adopted or a new asset class is institutionalized. Crypto is powerful because it serves as both a new type of distributed computer for developers (referring to blockchain) and a channel for creating entirely new asset classes (referring to tokens). When a new computer is invented, we see new technological paradigms, such as cloud computing, social, and mobile, that support new uses of technology. When a new type of asset is institutionalized, we see new types of investors and markets. We have never seen both of these situations occur simultaneously, and the acceleration of Crypto use cases speaks for itself.

During the bull market of 2017, blockchain was only used to transfer assets between centralized exchanges, while Tether was still on Bitcoin. During the DeFi summer of 2020, there was a Cambrian explosion of new financial primitives built on Ethereum, where smart contracts were first grouped together. In 2021, we saw millions of people playing Axie Infinity daily to earn a living wage, creating a self-sustaining global new economy with their local currency. We are accelerating towards a future where blockchain is as ubiquitous as the internet and as disruptive as the invention of the joint-stock company.

As part of our FVIII strategy, we have developed several operational assumptions for the world in 2030:

• Blockchain has 1 to 3 billion MAU
• DeFi has $10 trillion in TVL
• 1 million developers are building blockchain globally
• Blockchain scales to cost levels below 10 cents at 1 to 3 billion MAU
• P2E games become the largest human employer globally
• 5 to 10 P2E games have MAU exceeding 100 million
• Many are known by their alt (Note: pseudonyms) rather than their real names/identities
• 10 DAOs each manage over $100 billion
• Smart contracts worth over $10 billion are hacked
• DeFi remains the vertical with the largest share of revenue and profits
• Trading volume in DeFi derivatives and spot markets exceeds CeFi
• Most centralized exchanges route liquidity to KYC-Fi
• Most existing digital markets are moving on-chain
• Most social media networks and interactions exist on-chain
• Crypto will monetize most existing Web2 use cases, replacing ad-based monetization with tokenized attention loops
• Global Crypto policy undergoes positive changes, embodied by a "Crypto's Al Gore" (Note: referring to former U.S. President Al Gore, who proposed the famous concepts of "Information Superhighway" and "Digital Earth")
• The most valuable on-chain assets will be tokenized, large-scale machine learning models
• Blockchain becomes the de facto venue for issuing sovereign debt
• A medium-sized country forks Worldcoin and cuts the founders
• Governments issue on-chain UBI (Note: Universal Basic Income) to those completing blockchain tasks
• The world's top MEV searchers group earns over $1 billion annually
• The most popular sports teams are on-chain gaming guilds
• Most SaaS companies have their own L2 on Ethereum, replacing their public-facing APIs
• The most valuable personal artworks are on-chain

With the influx of billions of new users, our industry will be revitalized. Although we have made significant progress since the origins of Crypto itself, we still live in a wonderful old era today.