Original Author: Kay Feng

Founding Partner of Aperture Digital, Managing Director of NGC Ventures

TL;DR

At present, Web3 website building is very cumbersome, especially limited by the static page generator, which is generally limited to the Geek group

1. So bullish on (a not yet there) Web3 version of WIX / Strikingly

2. In the Web3 world, there is a lack of a database product available at the production environment level (neither the current public chain/storage is enough)

3. Therefore, looking forward to (a not yet well-implemented) Web3 database that can provide the most basic usability

4. Therefore, bearish on most of the current stage of "Web3 application"

5. In terms of active support for ENS, IPFS, CloudFlare's impact as a Web2 company is underestimated

In the past few months, I have been raising funds for a new investment institution Aperture Digital, and I have gone through a lot of centralized processes, and have to deal with repeated pitches, paperwork, and compliance, all of which are not different from traditional US dollar funds. different.

At the end of all this, I thought, as a Web3/Crypto-focused VC, how should the brand image be different from the traditional USD fund? Inspired by a friend──I decided to make a completely decentralized fund official website.

Aperture should be one of the first VC Firms to do this, if not the first.

During the whole process, I have a better understanding of the infrastructure of Web3 (instead of just looking at a bunch of "chain reform" and "coin reform" application layer projects), I am happy to share the whole process with you and experience.

first level title

vitalik.eth

Even for those who have just entered the rabbit hole of the encryption world, it is difficult not to know ENS and the mapping between ENS and Ethereum network addresses. For example, last week, we were still concerned about the transfer from the wallet marked Vb3 by the contract called by vitalik.eth Did the 30,000 ETH flow into the exchange (of course, it didn't).

But few people know that vitalik.eth is actually a blog site. You have two ways to visit Vitalik's blog:

1. Access using a browser with a MetaMask wallet installedvitalik.eth/, it will resolve to an IPFS Gateway (with a certain failure rate, it can be refreshed multiple times)

2. direct interviewvitalik.eth.linkfirst level title

EIP-1577

Whether you agree or disagree, you and I are very familiar with EIP-1559. In fact, there are more proposals in EIP, such as our protagonist todayEIP-1577image description

(image from Cloudflare)

static page generator

For programmer friends, this is no stranger. When GitHub emerged ten years ago, it was Jekyll and the free Pages hosting service that attracted many people.

To put it simply, for products such as blogs that do not require real-time and excessive back-end services, you can do a Build every time you update, generate a static page of blog content and host it, and users only need to modify the theme-related CSS styles, Edit the Markdown file to generate a basically usable website, and hand over the dynamic parts (such as comments) to third-party services such as Disqus.

For the Web3 world, this is actually a helpless move. Although by definition, both storage and public chains are "databases" to some extent, they face two problems:

• If the public chain is regarded as a database, even if there are no other problems, it is obvious that the performance cannot even meet the "basic availability" of the MVP level

• If the native service of storage services such as IPFS/Arweave is regarded as a database, its data structure is very different from traditional Key-Value databases and relational databases, and it is very difficult to develop

Is there such a service in the Web3 world? We did some research:

• IPFS Network: OrbitDB, Seems to be Basically Available, but Development Has Stalled

• Arweave: Kwil, very early

(I'm a little surprised to find this fact out, we certainly don't need to rebuild all of our Web2 infrastructure in Web3, but in a world where everyone is talking about Web3 apps, it's a pity that there isn't a basically usable database-like service. )

In short, static page generators seem to be the only choice for building websites in the Web3 world now and in the mid-term. Fortunately, generators such as Jekyll/Hexo have quite a lot of plug-ins, and common functions are not difficult to implement.

to build

With the above infrastructure, we can build a website where all links are decentralized, in other words, a real Web3 website:

• Domain name: ENS

• Frontend: Static Page Generator

• Backend: None

• Server: IPFS

In addition, we also need an IPFS Hosting / Gateway to help us synchronize the files of the website to IPFS. There are many service providers, and GitHub officially maintains aList of usability monitoring, I'm using Fleek, which has several important features:

• Can directly import GitHub Repo

• Monitors every Git Push behavior and builds in Docker

• Pity

Pity

The regret is mainly the subscription function of NewsLetter, because there is no available back-end solution, it is difficult to independently build related services on IPFS-even the most basic information collection form is difficult.

The subscription part essentially uses Mailchimp's service (there's an npm package called vuepress-plugin-mailchimp available).

I condone this last trace of centralization.

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Whether you are a developer or an entrepreneur, as long as you have any ideas about Crypto / Web3 entrepreneurship, please contact us at hi@aperture.xyz, we are willing to accompany the project growth from Day One.