The ways of Heaven are obscure, and time flies by. As the old year draws to a close, a new chapter awaits.
I believe the past sixteen years of Web3 development can be defined as a process of order reconstruction, moving "from entropy increase to entropy decrease," partly due to the extreme disorder and haphazardness exhibited by the industry in its early stages. In terms of the current global Web3 industry landscape and core business development, I think dividing these sixteen years into five eras might provide a clearer picture of its evolution.
Those who observe the industry may have noticed that since 2023, the frequent entry of external forces and the native Web3 ecosystem have coexisted. Although they mostly appear in different applications or scenarios, this is still an intriguing phenomenon.
The technological evolution over the past sixteen years has been driven by profound historical factors. The biggest driving force is not simply the lack of performance, but the structural mismatch between the "unlimited desire for computing" and the "limited block space". Strictly speaking, what we are experiencing is not a simple version iteration as before, but a generational shift from original innovation to real-world symbiosis.
The Beginning of Chaos and Multidimensionalization
Currently, the decentralized business landscape is still in a period of transition from chaos to order. Looking back from 2008 to 2017, in my view, this can be considered the first two eras of "the beginning of chaos".
The First and Second Ages addressed the question of "existence".
Bitcoin, utilizing its chain structure and Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism, created a "stateless value transfer machine." This is not simply "accounting," but for the first time since the birth of the internet in 1969, it elevated information from easily copied "bits" to conserved "digital matter," thus giving the internet an independent value anchor. Ethereum, through smart contracts, introduced "global state," expanding this simple value verification system into a globally shared "general-purpose computing environment."
Thus, blockchain diverged at the level of evolutionary philosophy, initiating networking and platformization, moving from the entropy-increasing chaos of "programmable assets" towards a multidimensional future.
During this period, the industry's internal structure was fragmented, with external access mainly controlled by centralized exchanges. In an attempt to innovate the paradigm, we tried to on-chain the Nasdaq order book model (such as EtherDelta), but due to the limitations of the infrastructure at the time, this was nothing more than a narrow "door" that was difficult to squeeze through.
The systemic problems caused by insufficient performance make the ideal of decentralization seem radical and naive in the face of a poor user experience.
Compromise and Breakthrough under Contradictions
The infrastructure challenges at the macro level, projected onto the increasingly active application layer, have made the third and fourth eras an evolutionary history full of compromises and struggles. For the first time, decentralization collectively fell into "performance anxiety" in the face of the "Blockchain Trilemma" problem.
From 2017 to 2022, during the long "breakthrough" transition period, upper-layer applications were forced to "cut their feet to fit the shoes." Faced with the increasingly congested block space of the Ethereum mainnet, infrastructure began to differentiate and technology began to decouple: from high-performance monolithic chains to multi-chain interoperability, and from monolithic to modular layering of Layer 2. All the technological detours pointed to the word "scaling" behind the collective anxiety.
As a slice of the decentralized technology industry, I often discuss the evolution of DEXs (decentralized exchanges). In my view, the reason why DEXs have undergone repeated iterations in form is essentially because they are solutions for market liquidity within a technological container.
AMM (Automated Market Maker) represented the "optimal compromise" achieved through technological solutions to liquidity issues within the "Blockchain Trilemma" framework during that period. This was another highlight of Web3's native innovation, replacing the computationally intensive order matching engines of traditional finance with the extremely simple formula x*y=k. By sacrificing capital efficiency and price accuracy, it achieved uninterrupted liquidity, representing a structural breakthrough in the conflict between infrastructure capabilities and trading models, thus contributing to the period of prosperity of decentralized finance.
At the dawn of the Fifth Era, infrastructure performance spilled over, and the benefits of AMM (Automatic Market Maker) disappeared. The evolutionary logic of decentralized technology underwent a profound reversal, and applications began to be "chained."
In order to achieve capital efficiency and break free from the constraints of the AMM topology, history, in a way that resembles a physical destiny, has revealed its coincidences. The innovative main line of individual protocols attempts to break free from the constraints of general-purpose chains and turn to "underlying reconstruction," where the overflow of infrastructure performance and the transaction demands of the new era begin to converge on the timeline.
After 2023, the Chain of Orders (CLOB) returned to the public eye with physical-level replication precision, and the DEX liquidity generation mechanism was restructured within a "democratized" production relationship. The call for "mass adoption" echoed in the distance, and you witnessed the convergence of "chain abstraction" and "intention-driven" approaches: cross-chain bridges, gas fees, RPC nodes, and other concepts were hidden within the black box of the solver. Then, the abstraction layer quietly stitched together hundreds of isolated chains of varying sizes; these unfamiliar terms circulating in the geek world all converged towards backend development.
The interplay between infrastructure capabilities and trading models, the tug-of-war between capital efficiency and liquidity costs, and the disconnect between decentralization and user experience—this other "Blockchain Trilemma" that should have been tightly binding DEXs—has also begun to dissolve and transform as it enters the fifth era.
Ultimately, the trading model has found its most intuitive and efficient form of existence within the roulette wheel of physical destiny.
From a "Native Isolated Island" to a "Symbiotic Continent"
Sixteen years of "social experiment" on the edge of wilderness is not a "miracle" left behind by the world. If we broaden our perspective, it is still an inevitable self-completion in the history of the evolution of Internet technology.
The half-century history of the internet is also the history of the birth of a "digital Leviathan". In the "Great Decoupling" wave that began in 1969, information was transformed from "atoms" into "bits", and the marginal cost of generation and transmission decreased to zero. In order to obtain the efficiency and convenience required for economic activities, humans simulated order and credit based on centralized databases, creating "islands in the ocean", and the data rights of individuals were transferred accordingly.
The creation of Web3 was the coming-of-age ceremony of the Internet. This illusory "ocean of information" achieved "independence" on an ontological level. Humanity is no longer satisfied with merely "mapping" reality through it, but hopes to rebuild the laws of physics in this digital void and construct a parallel universe that can bear value.
For five epochs, as the system's entropy has cooled, we have been witnessing a plate subsidence from a "native island" to a "symbiotic continent."
As asset quality becomes more substantial, the inflow of real-world assets is not merely a migration of funds, but also a form of mutual redemption. The physical world craves the atomic efficiency and global liquidity of on-chain settlement, while Web3 needs to introduce "negative entropy" from the real world to end the fragility and chaos of asset value relying solely on internal system confidence. This synergistic and compliant integration provides the network with an unprecedented physical anchor, transforming it from a "volatility" playground manipulated by speculative capital into the underlying foundation of global settlement.
More profoundly, when complex logical games are stripped away to AI and the execution layer, the differentiation of "computation and verification" drives the development of "back-end" interaction. Technology has begun to try to return simple certainty to you and me through "intention". The blockchain, wrapped in layers of computing power, retreats to the "cornerstone of truth" that establishes final consistency.
Thus, we may be seeing the final chapter of the fragmented landscape of Web3 infrastructure: the ecosystem is constantly "folding," and beneath the seemingly calm surface that users are unaware of the technology, a vast asset pool is surging that can seamlessly flow between heterogeneous networks.
Looking at the grand backdrop of technological civilization, Web3, like energy and internet protocols, will inevitably become the backend foundation, though invisible, it is verifiable.
The boundaries are melting away, and in a white light, humanity has gained a new name in the rhyme of history—the wisher.
