The World Crosses Over
Web2 begins to cross the bridge: not voluntary adoption, but gravitational attraction
In two thousand and twenty-four, something the crypto ecosystem had described as a distant goal became operational reality: Base surpassed Arbitrum in daily transaction counts across multiple periods, becoming consistently one of the highest-activity L2s in the world. Not through sophisticated DeFi volume, but through volume of real use by real people using real products.
Farcaster connected social experiences with applications on Base. Its core contracts, however, were on Optimism, with messages distributed off-chain. Frames could invoke experiences on other networks, including Base. Shared communities do not make the social protocol a blockchain built on Muspelheim.
Companies were building onchain on Base without announcing they were building on blockchain. Coinbase Commerce enabled onchain payments with an interface identical to any Web2 payment gateway. Creators used NFTs as tickets, membership passes, monetization mechanisms, without their fans needing to understand what an NFT was to use one. Digital identity evolved with ENS and other naming systems making onchain addresses as easy to use as usernames.
It was not voluntary adoption driven by ideological conversion. It was gravitational attraction, the same type of force that had pulled people toward email when it became easier than letters, toward smartphones when they became cheaper than computers, toward streaming when it became easier than a video rental store. Surtr did not need to convince. He needed only to remove enough friction for the gravity of utility to do the rest.
The Bifröst of Norse tradition, the rainbow bridge connecting Ásgard to the other worlds, was being tested by the weight of Muspel's Sons crossing toward the crypto ecosystem. The Norse prophecy says the Bifröst collapses under the Múspellsmegir's weight at Ragnarök. But Ragnarök is not only destruction, it is the transformation preceding a new world. The collapse of the barriers between Web2 and Web3 was not the end of something. It was the beginning of everything.