Author | Mu Mu Produced | Vernacular Blockchain (ID: hellobtc)

In 2019, blockchain was selected as one of the top ten buzzwords of 2019. Once upon a time, blockchain was as "hot" as AI is this year. In the past few years, it was once synonymous with "crazy". Today, we suddenly find that the domestic media and people around us are mentioning "blockchain" less and less. Some crypto enthusiasts even bluntly said that they felt "resisting" when they saw these three words... Blockchain is cool. Already, abandoned? Nowadays, many people have this question, so what has the blockchain experienced in these years? What is the situation now?

01 “Blockchain”! Why not “Blockchain”?

From popular buzzwords to "dogs don't care", it is obvious that the popularity of blockchain has gone down and cooled down. There is an old saying that "if God wants to destroy something, he will make it crazy". For a long time, many people even equated blockchain with "crazy" Bitcoin. Now is the crypto bear market, so people think that blockchain has been "affected", and it seems reasonable to blame the "cooling down" of blockchain on this. Of course, the current "cooling down" of blockchain may not be what people think it is.

A classic Gartner technology maturity curve can well explain the current position of the blockchain concept that was popular a few years ago.

In the short cycle of recent years, if 2017 and 2018 were the peak periods after the concept of blockchain was proposed, then the crypto bear market in 2019 and 2020 was its underestimation period, that is, a kind of "ignored" state after the bubble burst. Almost no one paid attention to it, and not many people were willing to talk about it. I have the impression that the "blockchain" at that time was even "colder" than it is now. A well-known investor even said in his circle of friends that he wanted to "vomit" when he heard this.

Later, the bull market initiated by DeFi Summer from 2020 to 2021 brought it into a climbing period. During this period, people came to their senses from underestimation, discovered its greater application value, and began to explore other possibilities.

Technological development is often complex, especially in this rapidly changing era. It is difficult to fully describe the current status of blockchain with just a Gartner chart. The Gartner curve is not static, and its final direction will change due to various influencing factors.

From a development perspective, blockchain, as one of the most important technical solutions for public chains, is naturally most closely related to public chains. In the past few years, when people and market funds have focused on public chain technology, various optimization solutions including blockchain expansion and consensus mechanism have become the focus of discussion.

Nowadays, with the emergence of a bunch of high-performance public chains and Layer 2 expansion solutions, public chains no longer have any technical bottlenecks, and the public chain ecological barriers represented by Ethereum are becoming increasingly deep. The public chain, which is the most important infrastructure of the blockchain, has almost been determined, and the window for new public chains is also closing.

As the concepts of DeFi, Web3, NFT, and Metaverse have been increasingly popular in recent years, we have seen the birth of some phenomenal Web3 applications, which have attracted more and more attention. People have begun to realize that we have entered the era of next-generation Internet applications. For ordinary users, there is no need to deeply master the difficult-to-understand underlying protocol blockchain, which has thus moved from the front stage to the backstage.

To give a simple example, in the years when PCs were popular, the biggest piece of cake for the capital market was the infrastructure "operating system" market. Most people at the time were discussing whether to install Windows, Linux, or buy an Apple computer. Many domestic operating systems were also "very powerful."

There were constant technical teams that innovatively developed various operating systems to join the competition in order to solve problems with leading products. Later, as time went on, the operating systems of Microsoft and Apple became more and more mature. They established their own powerful application ecosystem with absolute advantages, defeated most of their competitors and occupied market share. After that, there were very few new operating systems joining the competition in the market, and people turned their attention to various application software running on the operating system.

Nowadays, people have long forgotten the topics of which PC operating system is easy to use, smooth, and does not crash. The same is true for blockchain. It has gone from the front stage to the backstage and hidden its achievements and fame, which is not "cool".

02 Does blockchain still have anything to do with ordinary people?

As "blockchain" retreats to the background, ordinary people may hear less about this word in the future, but it does not mean that blockchain will have nothing to do with ordinary people in the future. Just like the PC operating system, even if it retreats to the background, people still need to use various applications based on it every day, which is completely inseparable from the environment provided by the operating system. The next generation of the Internet is also inseparable from the cornerstone of blockchain. When people operate web3 applications and enter the metaverse, blockchain is playing a role, protecting our information and assets. Security is inviolable.

For ordinary users, although concepts such as "account abstraction" proposed by the current crypto community will simplify the seemingly complicated wallet operations in the past, for example, when future Web3 users enter the application, they can verify by email, text messages, etc. like traditional Internet users, without having to keep their own private keys, and can use solutions such as social recovery to lower the user threshold.

It seems that ordinary users do not need to know what blockchain is in many cases, but "convenience" is often achieved by sacrificing security and decentralization. If you really want to safely keep your own encrypted assets and identity and pursue a high level of security, it is important to have a general understanding of the basic principles and safe use of blockchain asset wallets.

For ordinary investors, based on the basic principle of "don't invest if you don't understand", even if the future market focus is on applications, the understanding of the underlying blockchain technology can still have a significant impact on various decision-making directions and opportunity exploration. After all, the concepts, original intentions and basic principles brought by blockchain technology are the main reasons why most crypto projects have come to this day.

In addition, one of the important reasons why Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. are called public blockchains is that everyone can participate and supervise together, and the public chain also depends on the consensus support of users scattered around the world.

03 Summary

Blockchain is really "dead", but this is different from what some people understand. It has gone from the front stage to the backstage, from the madness when the concept was proposed to the silent support of the bottom layer after the application was implemented, completing a gorgeous transformation. The future blockchain will be closely related to our lives with the large-scale implementation of the next generation of Internet applications.