The Future Is Intermingled

Imagine if you signed a deal with a traditional Web2 SaaS company such as DocuSign or Salesforce…except there is a twist. As part of the deal, you tell Salesforce that you want to run part of their infrastructure on your own servers and get paid for it.

This is an exotic arrangement, but it is effectively exactly what is becoming common in Web3. No one has named this trend to my knowledge, so I will introduce a term here to describe it: Intermingling.

What is Intermingling?

Similar to the Web2 / Cloud era that preceded it, Web3 requires a lot of compute power to Validate and secure the myriad of blockchains in the market. Unlike Web2, Web3 deliberately breaks apart it’s infrastructure to ensure decentralization and not only encourages but actively embraces the use of “Volunteer” compute networks (Collectively known as Validators) as a core part of it’s strategy.

Increasingly, we are seeing an exotic new form of partnership where Validators nodes are “part of the overall deal.” Organizations will partner with some L1,L2 or similar and also bake into the deal an element of granting rights to act as a validator for that particular chain.

In other words, part of partnerships in Web3 and Crypto is to “intermingle” your infrastructure with your partners. Not only do we do a business deal, we also tie the knot by swapping core infrastructure.

It is a fascinating new method of partnering and I see it every day and expect it to only grow.