Blockchain infrastructure has come a long way since the early days of crypto. From Bitcoin to Ethereum, the rise of L2s, stablecoins, modularity, and the ZK revolution, blockchains have become faster, cheaper, more scalable, interoperable, efficient and programmable.

It seems like every day there’s a new L1 or L2 launching, bringing improvements to some corner of the Web3 stack. But when is enough enough with innovation at the infrastructure level? When will we arrive at the promised land of applications that people care about beyond the crypto bubble? When will Web3 finally take its rightful place and just be ‘the web’?

More and more protocol teams are realizing that, without apps people care about, innovating at the infrastructure layer is a game of diminishing returns. So they’re building their own apps to dogfood their tech and show the world what it’s capable of. 

It’s a good step in the right direction, but without a unified layer of abstraction on top of existing and future infrastructure, we’re still caught in the trap of fragmentation, broken composability, bad UX, and developer friction. We’re stuck in an immature, awkward teenager phase where innovation outpaces ease of adoption, where increasing complexity keeps the next wave of builders and users at bay.

Web3 today is like the world of personal computers before operating systems like Windows and Mac streamlined the developer and user experience. When computers had a steep learning curve, requiring more technical knowledge, patience, manual configuration, and hands-on interaction with things like command-line interfaces. The blockchain landscape today is like a complex maze of computer hardware without an OS to make development and user interaction simple enough for mainstream adoption.

Aiming upward

Anoma is not another chain. It’s a higher level of abstraction that shifts innovation upward from infrastructure to the application layer. 

By unifying the landscape of existing and future infrastructure under a single application layer, Anoma makes it possible for builders and users to stop worrying about the constantly evolving world of L1s and L2s. Builders can focus on building apps that people love, and users can get a simple, unified experience across every underlying chain.

Anoma frees users and developers from the complexity of underlying infrastructure so blockchain can evolve into a more mature phase. The thesis is simple: we need to move the space upward to the application layer or Web3 has no chance of breaking through to the mainstream. 

Crypto innovation has hit a ceiling. It’s time to move past the same old chain games. It’s time to aim higher. Upward.

This is not about discounting or minimizing the need for continued development at the base layers. Since Anoma can work with any blockchain, today and tomorrow, infrastructure can continue to evolve and improve while users and developers get an uninterrupted experience at the OS level. The space can continue to move forward across the entire stack, and builders can be ready for whatever the future holds.

But we need to recognize that we won’t win by making marginal improvements to infrastructure for the next 10 years. We win by giving the world apps and experiences that people love. We win by providing a real alternative to the traditional status quo. We need to be more ambitious. We need moonshots. It’s time to aim higher.

Upward.