The Breakdown - Will AI Vibe Coding Lead to Web3 Adoption?

Episode Date: March 9, 2025

That's the argument in discussion today. Source: https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2025/03/06/mass-adoption-of-web3-through-the-self-writing-internet Sponsored by: Ledger Ledger, the world leader in digital asset security, proudly sponsors The Breakdown podcast. Celebrating 10 years of protecting over 20% of the world’s crypto, Ledger ensures the security of your assets. For the best self-custody solution in the space, buy a LEDGER™ device and secure your crypto today. Buy now on Ledger.com. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/nathanielwhittemorecrypto Subscribe to the newsletter: https://breakdown.beehiiv.com/ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, March 9th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Hello, friends. obvious thing to do this week would have been to try to find something about the strategic Bitcoin

Reserve, but at the time of recording, I'm still waiting for a great piece to come out around that that wasn't debating it before it actually happened. Instead, we have a fun one from DFINITY founder Dominic Williams called mass adoption of Web3 through the self-writing internet. I will warn you that, as probably is to be expected from a protocol founder, this one is a little self-promotional in that although I think that it comes from a place of being excited about the trends that are shaping how DFINITY is acting, and thus wanting to share those trends, using the specific context that you have as the example, which makes it a little bit more palatable. And in any case, it's still an interesting topic worth engaging with, even if you ignore those

parts. So let's turn it over to the 11 Labs version of me to read mass adoption of Web3 through the self-writing internet. A new blockchain revolution is imminent thanks to advancing AI and vibe coding technology. Today, hundreds of millions of people own Bitcoin and other tokens hosted on blockchains worth trillions of dollars. Increasingly, though, blockchains host far more than tokens. In fact, blockchains are our future tech stack, and they can host sophisticated web apps, too, which live fully on-chain just like tokens. These apps are implemented entirely from network resident code, i.e. smart contract software and its evolutions. This has huge potential. By the end of 2025, more than 5 billion people will own internet-connected smartphones with

web browsers. So what might drive them to create and use fully on-chain web apps, which can sport seamless Web3 functionality? I believe a new blockchain revolution is imminent, thanks to advancing AI and self-writing app technology. This relates to an important emerging trend called vibe coding. Vib coding involves software engineers using tools with integrated AI that can write and fix software code on their behalf, making them much more productive. The self-writing app's paradigm takes this much further by enabling non-technical users to create, own, and update apps simply by instructing AI over chat. For reasons I will explain, blockchain is in a unique position to help bring this revolutionary functionality to the world. In the future, an individual will be able to

create a personal branding website, or something like a custom wedding planning app for a family member getting married just by talking to AI. An entrepreneur without technical staff or money will be able to create a new kind of e-commerce website or build a sharing economy app with Web3 Rails, and an enterprise will be able to create sophisticated CRM functionality for an infinitesimally small fraction of the investment in time and money that is currently required, all just by talking, without the need for software engineering or systems administration skills. In this new development paradigm, users will issue instructions to AI over chat and simply refresh their web browser moments later to interact with their new or updated app. Apps living on blockchains have a number of valuable

features. They are sovereign and censorship resistant because they live on a public network. They are tamper-proof, which means they are secure without depending on cybersecurity, incredibly resilient, and can seamlessly integrate powerful Web3 functionalities because they live on chain. In addition, blockchain technology solves major problems involved with having AI build solo on traditional IT. For example, the code that runs on traditional IT must be written carefully to avoid introducing security holes and the whole platform is sensitive to security configurations, from cloud accounts to operating systems running on cloud instances like Linux, to hosted platform software such as databases and web servers. This means traditional IT

infrastructure must often be further protected by cybersecurity systems such as firewalls and anti-malware. Failover and backup and restore are another concern, and service providers must be trusted. Trusting AI to build solo on traditional IT is a stretch, because even a single mistake can lead to a cyber attack that results in data exfiltration or ransomware encrypting data. Hello, friends, I am thrilled to share that Ledger is once again partnering and sponsoring with the breakdown. Many of you know, but for those of you who don't, Ledger is the most secure hardware wallet for your crypto and logins. It's trusted by 7 million users and secures 20% of the world's digital assets. What's more, Ledger is a lot more than wallets. Over the recent years,

they've built a comprehensive ecosystem of products and services, all of which are designed to make digital ownership more secure and accessible. You can buy your Bitcoin with Ledger and Ledger Live and so much more. Basically, not only did they want to keep your assets secure, they want you to be able to do more with them. Ledger's newest devices, the Ledger Stacks, and Ledger Flex, introduce the world's first secure touchscreens, making it easier and safer to manage your transactions and assets. Alongside Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex, the company also launched the Ledger Security Key app, offering a safer alternative to traditional passwords and enhancing your digital security. If you are in this space, you owe it to yourself to at least check out

Ledger and their ecosystem what they have available to you. So thanks, once again, to Ledger for sponsoring the show. Blockchains make it far easier for AI to build solo in many different ways. For example, the network resident code blockchain's host is serverless, greatly simplifying the coding tasks AI must perform, allowing code to be produced faster. On the internet computer network, code can also serve secure interactive web experiences directly to end users, and can store and process massive amounts of data efficiently,

and even be used to build things such as a fully on-chain social network, eGOC.app, or an important enterprise application. At DFINITY, we are great believers in self-writing apps running on public blockchains, which we term the self-writing internet, and have been developing supporting technologies for some years. For self-writing apps to reach their maximum potential, it must be possible not only for users to create them by talking, but also to continue updating and improving them in production, so they can talk until they have what they need, or a design that is optimal. Unless users can continue updating apps running in production, the total market addressed by the

self-writing app paradigm will reach only a tiny fraction of its tremendous potential. DFINITY has been developing a programming language framework called Motoko for usage by AI, as well as humans. When a user updates an app by adding or changing functionality, the AI must also describe how to update the structure of data inside the app so that none is lost. When the AI tries to install an update, the framework is able to detect if a mistake has been made that would cause even a small amount of data to be lost unintentionally so that it can ask the AI to try again. We believe the self-writing internet will democratize and decentralize tech on blockchain and are excited that a new platform called caffeine.AI will soon be released. Just by interacting

with caffeine over chat, users will create own and update sovereign apps on the internet computer and the world computer more broadly, which for us is the amalgamation of all blockchains that can host tokens and smart contract software. In the future, it will be possible to say, build me a personal Google Photos, which I can share with my family and friends, where we can add comments and emoji reactions to photos, or build me a remittance system so I can pay my international contractors using stablecoins. On blockchains, human imagination, rather than technical skills, will increasingly be the limit when creating web apps. The utility unlocked will drive massive adoption of blockchain, although oftentimes users may not be aware that blockchain

lies behind their game-changing experiences. I have long talked about a blockchain singularity occurring where decentralized networks become a major new tech stack. I think this is how we get there and the future is almost here. All right, back to Real NLW here. So there are two pieces of this essay, right?

One is the phenomenon of the self-writing internet. The second is the role of blockchains, but let's talk about the first one first. This is absolutely a thing that is happening, right now. One of the most rapidly growing uses for AI are these text-to-code tools like Bolt, Loveable, Replit, SoftGen, and a number of others that allow you to talk and get actual functional code out. They're being used to prototype things. This is how we use these tools internally at Super Intelligent. No one is allowed to write up feature ideas anymore. They have to prototype it with

lovable. But for many people, these are actually being integrated into full production pipelines, where the code that gets produced isn't just to show off what could be, but is actually used to deliver software. Over the last six months or so, we've hit an inflection point with the quality of these tools that have opened them up to a much wider audience, and I think that that's going to do nothing but expand. In that context, the phenomenon that Dominic is talking about

of people being able to create way more, not just websites, but actual applications, is absolutely going to be a thing. Now, exactly what the killer use cases for this will be, what the most common examples will end up as, it's very hard to know. If history is any indicator, the things that seem obvious at first won't be actually the things that people use these tools most for. However, whatever it ends up being, I think that the implications are huge, I think that it's going to change business, and probably a lot of creativity as well. Now, the second part of this

piece is about blockchains, and what they're good for here. And alas, I think this piece is somewhat less clear to me. Certainly the core benefits of blockchains that he articulates, like their sovereignness and censorship resistance, are true, and there will be certain applications for which that matters. The other parts, when it comes to, for example, his argument that blockchains, quote, greatly simplify the coding tasks that I must perform, allowing code to be produced faster, I am not technical enough to know or have an opinion really on whether that's true or not. However, what I will say is that if that is true, it would be a non-ideological reason for people to choose to host these applications in this way. And I think the fact that he's even making this argument

rather than solely relying on the censorship-resistant-type arguments is a good indicator of the possibilities here. At this point, wildly unsurprisingly, the overlap of AI and Web3 has been mostly a marketing ploy for token companies. I do think, however, that it would be a mistake to assume that just because there was a wave of people just looking to cash in on the AI hype, that that doesn't mean that there isn't really valuable overlap to be had here. we're just still figuring out what it is. I like that this whole self-writing internet phenomenon creates another opportunity to see if that manifests,

and I will certainly be watching the trend closely. For now that that's going to do it for today's breakdown. Appreciate listening, as always, and until next time, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.