
Open source transformed software by making code composable .
Open source transformed software by making code composable . Instead of having to build everything from scratch, developers could assemble applications from existing libraries, frameworks, and protocols.
Now, as AI drives the cost of producing software toward zero, composability becomes less about reusable code — and more about reusable networks .
The software is no longer the moat. The network is.
Revisiting crypto’s most ambitious ideas
Composability has always been one of the most compelling ideas in crypto, and more broadly, for many software developers and startup builders across different industries.
Early DeFi protocols like Uniswap — where new applications can build directly on existing liquidity instead of recreating it — demonstrate the power and promise of composability.
Yet this never became crypto’s defining narrative. The fundamental reason is that experimentation was too expensive. Building onchain applications requires specialized expertise in smart contracts, security, auditing, and blockchain infrastructure. Exploring the design space demanded significant time and capital, so the pool of builders remained small.
AI changes this. Now, anyone with an idea — including non-technical builders — can generate a working prototype, integrate existing protocols, and iterate in hours instead of months. As the cost of building software collapses, the number of experiments explodes. That makes this the right moment to revisit some of crypto’s most ambitious ideas:
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) create digital objects — collectibles/ art, event tickets, real world assets, community membership, intellectual property , and more — that applications can recognize and extend.
DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) offer a laboratory for internet-native organization and governance.
Decentralized social networks expose portable identities and social graphs.
Onchain games turn virtual worlds into open infrastructure and robust internet economies.
These ideas become powerful only when lots of people — and AI agents — choose to build on these networks.
But the internet needs shared state
AI can recreate almost any application. It can clone interfaces, rewrite APIs, and generate new products in minutes. AI doesn’t just make software cheaper — it changes what is scarce.
While software is becoming abundant, networks are not.
Imagine, for instance, that building crypto wallet software becomes trivial. Traders can simply generate their own wallet, or perhaps wallets disappear altogether as AI agents transact directly on users’ behalf.
In this world, the interface matters far less than the network underneath it. The scarce asset isn’t “the easiest wallet to use”. It’s access to the deepest liquidity, the strongest reputation, the richest identity graph, and the most trusted settlement network.
AI can make an NFT, but it cannot recreate an NFT’s provenance, community, or extensibility into other networks. It cannot recreate your online identity, your reputation, your social graph, or the liquidity inside a protocol. It cannot reproduce the history, coordination, and trust accumulated by a network.
You can’t vibe code USDC.
Perhaps this is what blockchains were always meant to become: the internet’s canonical layer of shared state. When applications become commodities, the value shifts to the networks they compose with. And in a world full of agents, this shared state is more necessary than ever.
The interface can be copied. The code can be regenerated. But the underlying state — the ownership, identity, liquidity, reputation, and relationships — remains scarce. These reusable networks are among the biggest opportunities for builders today.
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