Blockchain's Mosaic Moment

The Evolution of Blockchain Tech

If I say the word “blockchain” to you, you’re likely to think one of two things: Either “are we STILL talking about this nonsense?” OR “this thing is gonna hit computing like a tsunami”.

I am firmly in the latter camp. At time of writing - late October 2025 - blockchain (and in particular, Solana) has started to edge back into the mainstream news:

• Solana ETFs are now on Wall Street
• Visa (yes, THE Visa) is now using the Solana blockchain to speed up settlements using the USDC stablecoin
• Western Union is leveraging Solana blockchain for its own settlements

It is coming, people.

And if all these points above read to you like “Gandalf just bought a new air fryer” because when someone says “blockchain” you just picture red-eyed incels drooling over crypto exchange rates at 3am, then this next sentence is for YOU: Blockchains are NOT Crypto Currencies; Blockchains are interconnected records of facts and committed intentions.

The technology behind blockchain allows us to state with complete certainty that “X happened before Y” and (crucially) “it was definitely Alice who did X and Bob who did Y”. But moreover we can also say “Whenever somebody does Y in future, pay Alice 1% of the money involved, between now and (whenever)”.

And just like that, you have an unbreakable system guaranteeing proof of ownership, royalties and rights payments, contractual obligations, etc, etc, etc.

Blockchain is now Fast

Also, blockchains are FAST. Or at least, they are now. They haven’t always been.

Bitcoin (now considered an ancient blockchain technology) can only manage about 7 TPS (transactions per second) and Ethereum (largely the blockchain which gave us all the 2021/2022 mania in the mainstream) can only manage around 30 TPS. (Yes, I know “Layer 2” claims up to 100k TPS but in my considered opinion, Layer 2 is a delusional hack. So bite me, Crypto Bros).

So, enter Solana which clocks in at a demonstrated 65,000 transactions per second native capability. That’s 9,000 times faster than Bitcoin.

Blockchain is now Green(er)

“Aha,” you say, but what about power consumption and the environment? I’m glad you asked. The net energy consumed per transaction (including mining / admin) on each chain varies wildly:

• Bitcoin: 1.135kWh per transaction (which is INSANE. Stop using Bitcoin, people)
• Ethereum (the new Proof of Stake, more efficient Ethereum): 0.035kWh per tranaction
• Solana: 0.0084kWh per transaction. That’s a quarter of Ethereum, and 135 times less energy than a Bitcoin transaction.

The Usefulness (or otherwise) of Blockchain

Shiny statistics and eye-grabbing news headlines aside, there remains one very significant elephant in the room: Blockchain is often derided as just “a solution in search of a problem”, and there is quite a bit of truth in this. Like, the tech is REALLY cool and the innovations in each generation are really smart. But so far, aside from crypto currency mania, dangerously unregulated trading and lunatic price bubbles (anyone else remember the $20,000 monkey picture NFT phase?), nothing terribly useful has entered our lives via the blockchain.

And then the interest and the hype just collapsed. CRASH. Nobody cared anymore.

It’s easy therefore to dismiss the whole blockchain thing as a load of nonsense. But in FACT where we were after the NFT craziness was what the Gartner Hype Cycle refers to as the “Trough of Disillusionment”, which always follows the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”.

And in fact, pretty much every piece of technology which we now view as revolutionary and game-changing has gone through this “Peak of Inflated Expectations” ➡️ “Trough of Disillusionment" phase as part of its history.

Don’t believe me? Here are some examples:

Electricity (1880s - 1920s)

• Trigger: Edison’s light bulb (1879) and the promise of electrification.
• Peak: Wild speculation that electricity would cure disease, revolutionize everything overnight.
• Trough: Expensive infrastructure, limited reach; many early companies failed.

The Automobile (1890s - 1930s)

• Trigger: Early experiments and motor shows sparked fascination.
• Peak: Huge excitement in the 1900s; thousands of car startups in the U.S. alone.
• Trough: Poor roads, unreliability, and economic crashes wiped many out.

Personal Computers (1970s - 1990s)

• Trigger: Altair 8800, Apple II, IBM PC.
• Peak: 1980s hype - “a computer in every home.”
• Trough: Early disappointment; poor software, expensive, niche appeal.

The Internet (1990s - 2000s)

• Trigger: CERN’s web, browsers, dial-up access.
• Peak: Dot-com boom (1997 - 2000).
• Trough: Dot-com crash (2000 - 2002).

And so it is widely posited by many (including myself) that we are just in that Trough and that, like electricity and cars and the freaking internet before it, Blockchain will go through its own following period of Enlightenment after which suddenly everyone goes “ah yes wow I get it now - this is awesome” etc.

But how did each of these technologies above - which we now just take totally for granted and in fact cannot imagine life without - get out of the Trough and into Enlightenment?

Evolutionary Advantage

As it happens, the way these things emerge has a massive parallel with how species evolve:

First, there’s an incredible, widespread random series of experiments / products / startups (read: genetic mutations), some of which become adopted by people because they’re neat or helpful or make impossible things possible (like, say, the evolution of speech).

Then, yet other ideas build on top of those helpful mutations (e.g. songs built on top of speech and language, used to pass down helpful survival info to other humans in your now-speaking tribe) and, after a while, bang. It’s massive. (Like, for example, how humans ended up the dominant species on the planet. Sorry, planet.)

Right now, in blockchain terms, we’re still kind of only at the start of the “evolution of speech” phase. So right now, it takes a LOT of imagination to try to see where we might end up. (Imagine staring at an AOL dialup screen back in 1995 and predicting TikTok. Unlikely.)

How Good Ideas Emerge

How do good ideas emerge? Let’s look at the genesis of Smartphones - arguably THE defining human / tech experience of the last 15 years) as an example.

How Good Ideas Start

Back in 1989 when Tim-Berners Lee and the CERN team invented HTTP - the rules which tell computers how to ask for, receive, display and link between pieces of information from the web - there weren’t many of us who saw that it would change literally everything, literally forever. But it did. (A matter horrendously badly explained in the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony; yes I’m still angry 13 years later).

So what actually happened back then that changed everything today?

To make HTTP happen, in 1990 the CERN team also invented the blueprint for http daemons - the programs which enabled computers to serve up web pages on request. They were known as “http daemons” (“daemon” is a techy word for programs that run in the background on computers). Much later on these “http daemons” would eventually be called “web servers”.

These were pretty cool in a new tech way, and they started to become widespread, at least in the tech world. Most outside this bubble dismissed them as harmless, pointless nerdery. Time passed.

But then, in 1993 when Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina invented the first graphical web browser - Mosaic - then suddenly things started to happen.

You should know this: Mosaic was the point where literally everything changed. Literally forever.

• No Mosaic? No Chrome / Safari / Firefox
• No browsers? No massive proliferation of diverse new “web pages” in the mid 90s.
• No web pages? No search engines.
• No search engines? No instinct to “go look online”.
• No “go look online”? No “DO IT online”.
• No “do it online”? No apps.
• No apps? No smartphones.

It’s as simple as that. Boring old HTTP and nerdy http daemons / web servers. And now we’re here.

Enablement of Ideas

But HOW did the browser bring about the massive proliferation of new web pages in the early 90s and thus kick-start the developments on that list above which brings us up to the present day?

The answer isn’t necessarily obvious, but it did this in two crucial ways:

1. It abstracted away the complicated, highly specialised knowledge required to move words and pictures across the planet - instead of knowing network calls and computer-specific coding skills, all you needed now was to know someone running a web daemon who’d let you stick some files on their computer
2. It therefore reduced the knowledge burden to “learn HTML”

Now, HTML is still reasonably technical, but it is well within the grasp of most interested people to at least get some kind of mastery over.

And what this did, in turn, was to allow a different sort of thinker to enter the arena. Suddenly, if you were somebody who primarily liked writing words about a particular topic - any topic - and had a bit of a logical brain, you could publish yourself! Instantly! FOR FREE!

To put it another way: HTTP and The Browser came together to humanise the process of shoving published content around the world network. They buried previously insurmountable problems, boiled down to one requirement: “learn HTML”.

And today these people have a name that we all recognise. They were the first Web Developers.

A Wallet Development Kit

All of which brings me - finally - to the Tether WDK.

The blockchain world to date really has remained the domain of the nerd. There’s a formidably steep learning curve required to even get close to “doing something on-chain”. It’s not only the tech and the languages and network calls involved - it’s the damn fiddly and horribly inconsistent process for setting up users to even do anything on-chain.

Most humans interact with chain stuff via a “wallet” (although this name has outlived its relevance IMO) and setting up a wallet is a very different experience on each chain, united only by the single similarity of being bloody hard if you’re the one trying to write the new app to do it.

And so to date, only a very particular kind of developer has been attracted to and - more significantly - stuck with development of blockchain apps.

But Tether have just released a super-smooth chunk of code which makes it - quite simply - very simple as an app developer to connect your user to a chain. (And the WDK supports many chains, including - yes - Solana).

So suddenly - just as we saw with the HTTP + browser moment - this allows you to abstract away the complicated, highly specialised knowledge required to put your app users on-chain. In turn then, this will allow a different sort of thinker to enter the arena, just as the marriage of HTTP + Mosaic browser back in 1993 enabled the first generation of Web Developers who were not just Unix nerds coding in C.

Creating new apps / features which rely on on-chain presence of their users is now within the grasp of every app developer. The barrier to entry has been dropped. A more human-focused breed of developer may now operate in this space with way more ease than ever before.

This means that a widespread random series of experiments / products / startups (read: genetic mutations) can begin in earnest. Which means that others can then build on top of those helpful mutations. We’ve enabled the first generation of “On-Chain” developers who aren’t just the highly technical folk acutely focused on the workings of the chain.

I honestly think this is Blockchain’s Mosaic Moment.

About the Author

I’m Mark Henwood, a long-time compute and internet enthusiast and professional leader of tech projects, with a history of being an early adopter of game-changing technologies.

Please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.