I expect big growth in four key areas:
Web3 infrastructure
- NFT infrastructure (marketplaces, creator tools, aggregators(check out https://www.genie.xyz/))
- DAO tooling (voting and participation must be made more easy, more accessible and aggregated, more efficient treasury management structures)
Interoperability solutions
Especially bridges. When we have a multi-chain future and different application-specific L2s (for example ImmutableX) then all of these protocols need to "talk to each other" and exchange value seamlessly.
Crypto Gaming
Web3 will bring the Internet from the "read-write" era to the "read-write-own" era. For the first time, users will be able to own their inventory in games, and with this comes the ability to sell it for real dollars. This brings a huge new dimension into gaming. Before Web3, it was a world where nothing had monetary value attached to it, now all of this changes. The TAM (total addressable market) is huge, there are whole ecosystems with big social communities (guilds) in closed walled gardens (specific games), and all of this will be opened to real value creation (in dollar terms) and cross-world (game) value flow. Existing crypto games are mostly build from crypto-native engineering teams and not from experienced game developers. I think this will change in 2022 and we will see same really good games with crypto elements, build from actual game developers.
The return of DeFi
Decentralized finance was in a bear market against ETH the whole year. Especially the DeFi pioneers and corner stones like Aave, Compound, YFI, Curve DAO and Maker. This was to be expected as they did gain a fuckton against ETH in the bigger part of 2020. Also we saw some innovative new DeFi concepts like protocol controlled value (PCV) and Liquidity-as-a-service (LaaS) this year, we did invest in these emerging trends early with our investments in Fei protocol and Tokemak. I expect DeFi to make a big comeback in 2022 with improved protocols (check out YFIs new token structure), new concepts and big improvements in stablecoin yield generation.
my thoughts on the multi-chain future
In my opinion, in a few years down the road Ethereum will be established as the base layer. It will serve as the transaction layer for other L1s and L2s build on top of it. I imagine a world where Ethereum is the base layer of Web3 (NFTs, Metaverse, DeFi..) and will serve as transaction layer, and this base layer is fed by L2s that are build on top of it and other L1s (that are EVM-compatible, later eWASM-compatible).
I do not see a future where Solana and Co. are standalone competitors to Ethereum, as they just cannot compete. Solana is blazing fast, but lacks decentralization and security, this was sacrificed to achieve this speed. Solana has less then 2000 validators, which is not nearly enought o be counted as decentralized. It is much harder to build from a base of decentralization and security towards scalability and high-throughput (like ETH is doing) then vice verse. And L2s are an important step towards the end goal, transaction- and state-sharding are the others, but they are further down the road.
To sum this up: I think that alternative L1s will have a place, altough within the Ethereum ecosystem and for application-specific usecases. Not as standalone competitors