A new Web3 project starts on top of a decade of shared standards, open protocols, and financial primitives that have been tested with real money, and composability is what lets you connect those protocols like Lego blocks into a new financial or digital application. That is also why the ecosystem moves quickly, since each team builds on what the last one shipped instead of rebuilding it.
The core building blocks
Token standards
ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-1155, and their extensions are the language of value transfer onchain. They let a token move across wallets, DEXs, lending protocols, and DAOs, and every other layer below assumes that baseline.
Launch mechanisms
Token distribution has several established patterns:
- Initial DEX Offerings (IDOs) on Uniswap, SushiSwap, and other AMMs.
- Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools (LBPs), Balancer's mechanism for dynamic price discovery.
- Auction protocols such as Gnosis Auction and MISO, which run batch and Dutch auctions that reduce MEV.
Those rails are proven, so a new project rarely needs its own token sale mechanics.
Liquidity infrastructure
Uniswap, Curve, and Balancer standardized automated liquidity provision, aggregators like 1inch and Paraswap route across their pools, and bridges extend that liquidity across chains, which together give a new token market access and price stability.
Governance
DAO infrastructure has become its own modular stack:
- Onchain governance: Compound, Aragon.
- Off-chain signaling: Snapshot.
- Treasury management: Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe).
- DAO frameworks: DAOstack, Tally.
A team can assemble governance from those parts instead of writing its own.
DeFi primitives
The primitives that most applications compose with fall into four groups:
- Lending and borrowing: Aave, Compound, MakerDAO.
- Derivatives and synthetics: Synthetix, Perpetual Protocol, dYdX.
- Yield strategies: Yearn, Enzyme, Idle.
- Stablecoins: DAI, USDC, and FRAX as units of account and settlement.
These DeFi primitives are APIs in the form of smart contracts, and they depend on each other: Yearn builds on Curve, Curve integrates MakerDAO stablecoins, and DAOs govern all of them.
L2s and cross-chain standards
Composability originally meant Ethereum composability, and gas costs limited what it could do. Layer 2s such as Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, and Starknet made execution cheaper while keeping Ethereum's security, and the same primitives now exist across L2s, often connected through canonical bridges and shared governance.
Cross-chain composability is taking shape through three kinds of standard:
- ERC-20 cross-chain extensions, such as LayerZero's OFT standard.
- Cosmos IBC for token and message passing.
- Generalized messaging protocols like Axelar, Wormhole, and Hyperlane.
The result is a composable network of chains and execution layers, where a token can be issued on Ethereum, gain liquidity on an L2, and flow into a Cosmos appchain without losing its identity or governance hooks.
GRC-20: a standard for knowledge
Token standards like ERC-20 made value composable, and GRC-20 applies the same idea to knowledge, with a common structure for organizing and sharing information across decentralized applications.
GRC-20 organizes knowledge into three parts:
- Spaces are knowledge domains that communities, projects, or individuals create.
- Entities are people, places, things, or concepts with unique IDs and structured facts.
- Relations connect entities and give them meaning and context.
Applications can then build on shared knowledge graphs instead of isolated databases, so a news app can link to verified claims, a health app can reference research studies, and an educational platform can connect lessons to real-world skills on the same structure. If that works, information gets the network effects that shared liquidity pools gave DeFi.
With token standards at one end and knowledge graphs at the other, a new application can put its effort into the product instead of the infrastructure, and it inherits the risks of everything it connects to.
The risk of interdependence
Shared infrastructure brings systemic risk. A bug in a stablecoin can ripple through lending markets, liquidity pools, and DAO treasuries, Terra/Luna showed how interconnected systems amplify a shock, and the multichain era makes those dependency chains longer.
Audits, circuit breakers, and risk frameworks are how teams contain that exposure while still composing, and I would map every protocol a product depends on before deciding how much of it to trust.
What composability changes for founders
For founders and technical leaders, composability changes the economics of building in three ways:
- Speed to market: you integrate Uniswap or Aave instead of building your own exchange or lending pool.
- Focus: your effort goes into the product experience or the unique mechanism, and the shared plumbing comes from existing protocols.
- Network effects: a token or DAO built on standards works with existing wallets, DEXs, and treasuries from day one.
Building on the internet works the same way, since nobody reimplements TCP/IP, HTTP, or TLS to ship a web product.
Starting a new Web3 project
When I start a Web3 project, I use existing standards like ERC-20, ERC-721, and established DAO frameworks, build on proven primitives like Uniswap, Maker, Safe, and Snapshot, and compose across chains and L2s only where the product needs it. The part I write from scratch is the mechanism or experience those protocols don't already cover.