KiteWeb3

Working inside Solidity taught me something counterintuitive about building successful products. Solidity has around 90% market share for smart contracts, effectively a monopoly. This puzzles people. How did a language modeled after JavaScript, often considered "inferior" to Rust or Haskell, become so dominant? It made no sense. I quickly learned that programming language experts, especially those on crypto Twitter, have different needs than real users. Example 1: The experts kept telling us that 'modifiers' were bad design and should be removed. We almost considered it. Then we ran our annual developer survey. Modifiers were rated the #1 most loved feature in Solidity! Shocking! Example 2: In version 0.8.0, we prevented arithmetic overflows by default. This change upset many experts, who claimed it was a bad idea. However, when I went to conferences, developers would walk up to me to say it was the best release ever, that they could finally stop worrying about arithmetic overflows and were genuinely grateful for the feature. The more opinionated the experts were, the further they were from real user needs. They can't be blamed. They weren't in the trenches with real users. Their view of an ideal user is really just themselves. One more thing Solidity did well is attracting people who might not have seen themselves as developers. Hayden had only used MATLAB and JavaScript before building Uniswap in Solidity. Today, Uniswap sometimes surpasses Nasdaq in daily trading volumes! This would never have happened if Solidity had been designed after Rust. This was an eye-opening realization for me that more crypto founders should study. Crypto has always been ignored by top traditional developers. I've had web2 friends challenge the legitimacy of the industry when they learned what I did. Solidity's accidental genius created a whole new group of developers in this new world. Hayden is one example. There are so many more. I meet people regularly whose first real programming language was Solidity. They have had life-changing experiences after that. And they do not fit the profile of a traditional developer. You need to internalize this if you're building a crypto platform that requires developers, creators, or founders to be onboard. You're better off cultivating talent from within rather than trying to onboard from outside the crypto space. This is why many failed at streaming x tokens. The Twitch streamers didn't care, and if you wanted to win, you had to cultivate talent organically from within. If I could give one advice, if you're young, join a winning team. Nothing teaches you more about winning than studying how winning teams win. You'll never be able to guess why from the outside.