While I agree that a “Killer App matters”, I don’t think the right question to ask is what that killer app is. It reminds me a bit of having a shiny hammer and trying to find a nail. Instead, I think you should start with a vision of how you want the world to look like and then ask yourself what tools you need to get there.
My vision for the internet of the future boils down to:
- Replacing large centralized applications with decentralized ones that are largely goverened by its users and open source.
- Replacing many ad-driven monetization models with seamless micropayments. Just pay a fraction of a cent for every search you do instead of seeing ads. “If it’s free, you are the product.”
- Replacing walled gardens with open protocols and standard. Instead of having a central social network that controls every layer of the stack, why not one common data standard? Then you can choose your own search provider, your own moderation provider, your own frontend.
So I pretty much want to see every web2 application rebuilt with these principles.
If you’re onboard with that vision, the next question is how can we get there?
For that we need a developer platform that is both scalable and provides a great developer experience. I don’t think vanilla ICP is there yet. It doesn’t have horizontal scaling out of the box and having to learn Rust or Motoko and cycle managment is a huge step backwards from web2 development.
That said, I do believe ICP could be the execution layer for these apps, as I outlined in my post on Building planet scale apps on ICP . I’ve started working on such a developer platform that also aims to have a developer experience on-par with Firebase (or even better if you want to do micropayments). Hopefully that will make building killer apps easier in the future 