Can Thirdweb become Shopify for the Web3 era

Developer interest in Web3 has grown dramatically over the past decade. According to Electric Capital's Developer Report 2021, Web3 monthly active developers reached an all-time peak of 18,416 in December 2021.

In addition, the number of new developers added to Web3 each year in the past decade has generally been on the rise. More developers joined Web3 in 2021 than in any other year, totaling 34,391.

A large number of developers join and continue to be active in daily life, bringing rapid innovation to many ecologies and use cases in the Web3 and Crypto fields: whether it is infrastructure such as L1 and L2, or use cases such as DeFi protocol, NFT products and games are constantly pouring out.

However, the new network and use cases for the Web3 ecological inject vigor at the same time, some new programming language, standards, and virtual machines, as well as the form of best practices for builders brought greater complexity, and with the developer's interest in Web3 growing and the deepening development of ecology, the complexity will increase. For example, building decentralized applications not only requires interaction with smart contracts, but also involves many aspects, such as message passing, decentralized storage, encryption proof and signature.

Therefore, it is important to have a development tool that simplifies this complexity and will help bring more people to Web3. Thirdweb, led by Haun Ventures for $24 million and backed by a number of well-known institutions and entrepreneurs, is just such a full-stack Web3 development tool platform. Next, BlockBeats will introduce the project in detail.

Led by Haun Ventures, the technology is coming to the Web3 debut

In February 2020, AppLovin, ranked by Pocket Gamer as one of the top 50 mobile game manufacturers, acquired Machine Zone (MZ). It used to be called the number one mobile game company in the US and was founded by Gabriel Leydon. After leaving MZ, Gabriel Leydon moved into Web3 and founded Limit Break, the parent company of current NFT project DigiDaigaku.

AppLovin, a $20 billion-plus mobile technology developer originally founded by serial entrepreneur Furqan Rydhan and serving as CTO, enables developers of all sizes, including game developers, to market, analyze, and publish their apps or mobile games on its platform.

Later, Furqan Rydhan also joined Web3 and started a new journey. He started with Steven Bartlett, a well-known entrepreneur, and Furqan served as CTO, and Thirdweb was born. Thirdweb started as a simple NFT incubation project, but ran into some infrastructure issues and decided to build a developer tools platform themselves.

Furqan Rydhan (left) and Steven Bartlett (right)

When he met Furqan, Steven was equally excited to say that he has a strong interest in Web3 and cryptocurrencies and has been following the space for more than four years. Previously, Steven founded Social media marketing company Social Chain and is also the host of the popular "CEO Diary" podcast, which was the most downloaded business podcast in Europe in 2021.

Currently, Thirdweb, which was founded in London, is headquartered in San Francisco and operates in London, with Steven as its CEO. They want to remove the complexity of building decentralized applications in areas like NFTS and DAOs, and simplify building Web3 apps in the same way payments service Stripe simplifies payments.

Specifically, Thirdweb provides a full suite of development tools, including pre-built and approved smart contracts and SDKS, to help developers create and deploy their Web3 projects. In addition, Thirdweb provides a comprehensive UI component library and authentication solution that makes it easy for front-end developers to build a great user experience on top of its smart contracts. Once the contract is deployed, Thirdweb's dashboard and analytics tools ensure that every developer can monitor the on-chain activity of his smart contract.

As a result, developers can add features, including tokens, NFT drops, NFT marketplaces, DAOs and games, with just a few clicks, without writing any code. Thirdweb saves developers time and cost by providing an end-to-end solution from creation to post-deployment management.

Currently, Thirdweb supports Ethereum, Avalanche, Fantom, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Modernism Layer2, and plans to expand to Solana, Flow, and other public chains.

In less than a year since its launch, Thirdweb has grown rapidly, with officials saying that more than 55,000 developers have deployed about 200,000 contracts across multiple chains and created more than 500 projects. In the last three months alone, the project has generated $7.5 million in revenue. Thirdweb, on the other hand, takes no fees or commissions, just a 5% royalty on secondary sales of digital assets such as NFTS built on the platform.

Thirdweb also recently raised $24 million at a $160 million valuation, led by Haun Ventures and represented by Coinbase Ventures, Shopify, Protocol Labs, Polygon and Shrug VC. Individual investors include Joseph Lacob, a partner at top Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, who is also a majority owner of the NBA's Golden State Warriors.

Thirdweb also received funding from Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, and Gary Vaynerchuk in a $5 million seed round.

What features are included in Thirdweb

Thirdweb provides developers with a full-stack Web3 development kit that allows developers to build, launch, and manage their Web3 projects without writing any code, reducing significant development time and cost. So what exactly does this toolkit include?

Smart Contracts

Deploying smart contracts is the first step in building any Web3 application.

Users can Deploy Thirdweb's pre-built contracts for common use case tokens, NFTS, and so on, or use extensions to the platform to build their own smart contracts and then publish using Deploy.

1)Pre-built Contracts/Contracts

The pre-build contract, written by the Thirdweb team, is open source, reviewed and supported by its bug bounty program, and is free to deploy (excluding gas fees); It can cover the most common smart contract use cases: including quick Token creation, NFT Drop release, NFT market establishment, DAOs, etc.

2)Subject Extensions (Extensions)

Extensions can be thought of as building blocks that are packaged together as base contracts with a suite of out-of-the-box features that help enrich the user experience with smart contracts.

For example, by using Solidity to build smart contracts such as ERC721Base, the contract will unlock the functionality of the dashboard and SDK, providing access control and royalty fees.

Release (Release)

By publishing a smart contract to the smart contract registry on the Thirdweb chain, a user unlocks a way to create a versioned deployment of the contract. When a new version is released, it can be easily deployed to any network supported by Thirdweb with one click, and each version is signed by the user's wallet, so full control is retained.

Also, a smart contract in the registry can be viewed and deployed by anyone from the dashboard, where metadata, authors, release notes, and source code are publicly available and stored on the chain.

Deploy (Deploy)

Users can use the "NPX thirdweb deploy" command to compile and deploy any smart contract, whether pre-built or published, without the need to copy the ABI (contract source code) or generate bindings.

In addition, instead of deploying locally with an insecure and unfunded private key, users can deploy directly from their wallet on the browser, getting an automatically generated SDK and dashboard to interact with and manage the deployed contract.

SDK

Thirdweb provides an SDK that allows users to easily build Web3 applications, such as adding "connected wallet" functionality to their applications without writing code.

In addition, the Thirdweb SDK has a variety of other features, including deploying and interacting with smart contracts, uploading and parsing metadata from IPFS, and support for the most popular languages (JavaScript, Solidity, React, TypeScript, Python, and Go), So that users can use familiar tools to build different types of applications.

Dashboards

The dashboard is a central place for users to create, manage, and interact with smart contracts, so each contract deployed comes with an intuitive dashboard for management. Once a user has deployed a contract, they can fine-tune their behavior by editing their configuration, such as metadata, royalty fees, and permission controls.

In addition, the dashboard makes it easy to track users' contracts, read on-chain data, view logs, and send transactions; At the same time, you can also build teamcentric, integrating users' teams or organizations on the chain, delegating authority and managing their funds; And all on-chain analysis is centralized in one place, automatically generating analysis reports, etc.

Auth (Certification)

Auth allows Web3 streaming to be integrated into any back-end setup or Web2 service.

For example, it can only log in to the application created by connecting to the wallet and access the service immediately. Securely verify the on-chain identity of existing users to make relevant subscriptions and payments through the use of an Ethereum compliant login process; The authentication system also protects the backend with a Web3-compatible identity that conforms to the widely used JSON Web Token standard.

Can it be Shopify for the Web3 era

In addition to Haun Ventures led by venture capital queen Katie Haun, Coinbase Ventures and Shopify were also involved in Thirdweb's funding round.

Not surprisingly, Coinbase's NFT marketplace has worked closely with Thirdweb.

In July, Coinbase NFT Marketplace officially launched the first NFT Drop powered by Thirdweb (Scaredy Cubits), the Genesis part of the NFT series sold out within minutes of its launch. It was a natural fit to add Thirdweb to Coinbase Ventures' portfolio.

So why would Shopify, a Web2 cross-border e-commerce platform, invest in Thirdweb? In fact, Shopify has been in the crypto space for a long time, and has been actively laying it out on Web3 in recent years.

In early 2020, Shopify announced it was joining the Libra Association to promote transparency about how platform funds are used and to protect the privacy of user data. In 2021, as the NFT circuit exploded, Shopify added a service to cast and trade NFTS for Shopify Plus merchants in the US.

Today, Shopify is betting that Thirdweb, integrated with the Thirdweb Web3 toolkit, will make it easier for creators of its platform to create Web3 apps with simple SDK tools, Take it one step closer to a decentralized Internet infrastructure.

At the same time, Thirdweb and Shopify have similar business models as solution aggregation platforms, despite being on Web3 and Web2 respectively. Thirdweb helps users reduce the time and cost of creating Web3 applications with full-stack Web3 development tools, and Shopify provides an out-of-the-box online retail store solution for smes and home users.

As a result, Shopify's success over the years as a rapidly growing service provider that emerged from the Red Sea of Web2, founded in 2004, may have a lot to learn from Thirdweb's expansion.

And CEO Steven Bartlett's vision for Thirdweb: "Web3 is not only the future, it is the present, and we are witnessing and participating in a great technological shift that will touch multiple industries and thousands of lives. Just as Stripe made it easy for builders and creators to pay, we built Thirdweb to make Web3 simple, fearless, and accessible, "and will move closer to reality.

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