Yorke Rhodes, who has worked at Microsoft for seven years as the Director of Digital Transformation, has confidently declared that ethereum would become the next app store in only two years.
“By 2023, Ethereum will become the Decentralized Appstore,” he predicted in August, citing eth’s cheap costs and Apple’s appstore’s revenue sharing.
This indicates that Rhodes believes ethereum will scale in the next two years, most likely through zk-techs or plasma-like rollups.
Additionally, Rhodes notes that Ethereum offers many benefits, including “no commerce lock-in to Apple, no single point of control by a single giant corporation, and eth is distributed, decentralised, and single sign-on across applications, as well as payment, identity, and commerce in one.”
Even a few months ago, this fringe concept was becoming more popular in Silicon Valley’s upper echelons as a result of the metaverse.
Numerous contemporary web2 giants have said that they would add crypto into their stack if they were creating web2 today.
Thus, many anticipate that the next wave, the metaverse or web3, will include crypto in some form. Former Microsoft employee Ben Thompson writes on his blog Stratechery:
“This is the function that blockchains will fill: they will give uniqueness and mobility where they are required, allowing you to live not just a totally online life, but as many lives concurrently as you choose, locked in nowhere.”
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Thus, it’s unsurprising that Tim Cook took the time, after so many years, to inform the world that he now owns some bitcoin. That indicates to us that Apple is indicating that we are keeping an eye on things. They are keeping an eye on Facebook and Microsoft.
Zuk, whom many despise but we’re not sure what to make of, obviously puts crypto at the core of his broader agenda. He is or was negotiating for that ‘crypto’ to be his crypto, but we’ve seen enough of u-turns in this arena, so maybe we can arrogantly assert it was a rookie error for Mark Zuckerberg, who was exposed to cryptos just two or three years ago.
Because anything like identification or ownership can only exist in a decentralised public blockchain that is publicly owned and governed. If not, it will be halted, as Libra was.
Microsoft has been on the outside of the eth ecosystem since 2016 and has never been at the forefront of anything in the crypto field. They’re a mystery to us in some respects, the blatantly undervalued comeback child of mythical proportions, having almost surpassed Apple in market capitalization.
What they want is not quite apparent, but it is extremely probable that when it comes to web3 or metaverse ownership, they mean public blockchain.
If that is the case, Zuk will be forced to public blockchain, and if that is the case, you will have a decentralised appstore that competes with and perhaps even surpasses Apple’s.
As-is, ethereum does have a form of app shop, but one that is decentralised, with several interfaces managed by various companies rather than a single large appstore.
It is, however, niche in the grand scheme of things, and in two years, our estimates indicate, it will be able to scale and thus move from niche to mainstream usage, but two years is also essentially tomorrow in terms of development, and thus we cannot see it posing a threat to Apple’s appstore in that time frame.
Also Read: Myanmar’s Underground Government Makes Use Of Tether To Combat Military Control
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