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Which comes first: app innovation or infrastructure innovation? A deep UPS dive suggests the cycle has always been apps first, infrastructure second — and crypto is accelerating that flow.
Learn how the Web3 stack fits this thesis, how crypto networks are two sides of the same coin in the app infrastructure cycle, and how Pocket Network is driving the development of DApps.
A popular UPS essay suggests that with the advent of new technologies, applications arrived before the supporting infrastructure was fully “ready”, leading to a necessary development cycle and infrastructure stack improvement.
Some would argue that infrastructure is needed before applications to ensure use cases can actually be built by developers and adopted by the community. The same thought is present in the Web3 community. On the other hand, UPS-backed Web3 founders suggest that the “biggest challenge for them is getting developers to build apps on top of networks.”
UPS points to an iterative “apps->infrastructure->apps” cycle that lifts both apps and infrastructure, a trend seen since the advent of internet/email to new programming languages, which led to the rise of early web apps (e.g. Amazon, eBay) and to date with crypto networks.
