The purpose of this post is to explore different ideas of on-chain solutions for systems that are inherently limited by either financial or technical bottlenecks.
If web3 encapsulates everything beyond Defi, then based on the standards of existing projects, the industry has only scratched the surface of what’s possible with blockchain as a service. I believe the expansion of web3 has been slowed by the bottlenecks of existing underperforming monolithic blockchains.
That being said, with a low-cost, hyper-scalable, and decentralized value-transfer infrastructure (Quai) - What’s possible?
To give an idea:
- An $11B Scalping industry dissolved and redirected back to creators by High-frequency NFT ticketing protocols operating on zone chains
- Inaccessible SME financial services transforming into Multi-faceted Defi services for any business with the opportunity to distribute their risk across multiple chains
- Remove the bottleneck of a centralized payment middleware with a Private, secure P2P Payment rails equivalent, if not superior to, that of Venmo
- Bypass the problems of major user-data aggregation with a low-latency, decentralized social media interactions streamlined by a unique business model that removes transaction fees for on-chain interactions in exchange for quality user-generated value
Now let’s dive more specifically into a prominent global issue and see how Quai could assist the world in solving it.
What do refrigerators, chicken wings, and automobile-based microchips all have in common? They’re all products whose supply has been bottlenecked by inefficiencies in the supply chain industry. At a high-level its easy to point fingers at the Covid-19 lockdown, unsettled US-China relations, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict to be the core disruptors to manufacturing, transportation friction and congestion, and labor shortages (Peep JPMorgan’s research post). Yet, as we aim to evolve our systems as we are doing with Quai Network, the goal should be an adaptable, antifragile supply chain that can respond to system limitations effectively and ultimately self-optimize.
Self-optimization, more or less, is the process of autonomously adjusting network parameters such that the network performance can near its optimal state - something the core devs at Quai are very familiar with. To achieve self-optimization across the global supply chain, the network would immediately require reductions in the information latency of transactions, transportation status, and production curve across different agents in the supply-chain network.
To implement this, it would likely require a reliable, high-frequency infrastructure with low latency - Quai Network for instance - with the enhanced middleware of a geographic-based, topology-optimizing middleware (similar to what Judi mentions here).
While this feat would require much more thought to truly do it justice, it’s beginning to get more clear how leveraging a decentralized global ledger of transactions that actively reflect the health of the supply chain can be a monumental step in evolving the multi-billion dollar supply-chain industry that has multi-trillion dollar effects.
Of course, these ideas are simply ideas and possess their faults - but in a world plagued with financial and technical limitations inflicted by web2, who knows what’s possible with Quai Network?
I’d love to hear any feedback on the probability of these solutions, any expansions on these ideas, or other unique business models that can change macro-systems.