Ramifications

A New Market Framing

This has been a pet-peeve of ours for a while now. Web3 has been skewed towards the blockchain / network providers, which translated into forcing debilitating constraints on developers and users. It stems from the fact that, ceteris paribus, chains tend to be incompatible with one another. Cross-chain transactions require a bridge or other cumbersome solutions. Those are, for most users, insurmountable. We’re not implying a conspiracy. We’re saying that differences in architecture and deployment technologies created a mono-chain, segregated reality, and that the burden it incurs is being carried by the developers and users. Perhaps an example will illustrate. Imagine a DApp (let’s say it’s an NFT game with a name that rhymes with Kabook). It decided to develop on X infrastructure for example AT&T. The potential market for the DApp is anyone who likes the game, regardless of the infrastructure they are familiar with. However, if a user is accustomed to using a different infrastructure, one that uses, for example, Verizon, functioning across the providers(e.g., moving funds) is not trivial. To convert that user, the DApp needs to invest effort not only in convincing him to adopt the game, but also in convincing him to adopt a new provider.

This exact setup has made the lives of blockchain network providers easy. They need to convert (sell to) the DApp developers once. After that they have little incentive to compete. The DApp and users are a captive audience. That DApp can partially solve this by deploying separately and autonomously on different chains. However, it’s only a partial solution because although it allows access to more users, the DApp’s tokenomics/game-economics are still segregated and cannot interact across chains. Also, it’s an expensive solution because the cost of user acquisition and retention, as well as service maintenance and other overhead are multiplied.

Snook, by employing this new technology, has flipped things around. Now the issue of incompatible networks is moot. As long as information can stream across networks the only cost is deployment. The users can play with other players from other networks, while the “accounting” is settled after the match or at the end of the season.

This is huge because the users are now free to evaluate the chain for themselves (and not be beholden to the choice of the DApp. A choice that was made months or years before, and which was based on different types of criteria). The Blockchain network provider can’t rest on the laurels of their initial sale. They now must innovate and compete to attract and retain users (thus lowering gas prices, improving performance, reducing down time, etc.)

You get the picture, right? We think it's pretty awesome.

WEB3 Desegregation

It also means that we can deliver WEB3 desegregation and tap into a new user base from any network, both EVM and NON-EVM, i.e., any DApp can be easily deployed to any chain, and provide an unaffected chain-agnostic user experience.