What do JavaScript, Solidity, and Facebook all have in common?

They all won markets where better alternatives existed.

First mover advantage is real but misunderstood. The advantage isn’t being first. It’s being first and building network effects before competitors can catch up.

Let’s look at three cases.

Network Effects Compound Until Switching Is Impossible

Facebook launched in February 2004. It was not the first social network.

MySpace had 25 million users by 2005. Friendster existed. Orkut had 300 million users globally. International clones proliferated: VKontakte in Russia, Xiaonei (later Renren) in China, StudiVZ in Germany.

Most failed. Some survived in niches. But Facebook won the global market despite being late and despite having objectively worse features than some competitors at various points.

How? Network effects compounding over time. Once enough people were on Facebook, being on Facebook became mandatory. Your friends were there. Your photos were there. Switching costs grew faster than any competitor could overcome.

The copycats that survived (Reddit, Twitter/X, Nextdoor, TikTok) didn’t try to be Facebook. They found different niches with different network dynamics. Instagram was acquired before it could become a real threat, which tells you something about what Facebook feared.

First mover advantage with network effects is powerful. But it’s not absolute. You have to find seams.

Distribution Won; Standards Made It Durable

JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich in ten days. May 6-15, 1995.

Eich later said: “The internet meant there was a huge first-mover advantage, and being fast, getting on first, mattered a lot.”

The alternative was VBScript. Microsoft’s version. Eich’s summary: “would’ve been bad.”

Today JavaScript powers 97% of websites. It’s not because JavaScript is technically superior. It’s because JavaScript was there first, in every browser, and the switching costs became insurmountable.

But here’s the interesting part: JavaScript survived its flaws through community collaboration on standards. ECMAScript standardization. TC39 committees. Gradual evolution that kept the language relevant without breaking the web.

The first mover advantage was distribution. Every browser included JavaScript. The durability came from standards that let the language evolve.

First Mover + Open Standards = Dominance

Solidity is like JavaScript for smart contracts. First mover. Not technically superior. Dominant anyway.

Ethereum launched in 2015. Solidity came with it. Developers learned Solidity because that’s what you used to write smart contracts on Ethereum. The syntax has problems. The security model has footguns. Better alternatives exist.

Doesn’t matter. Solidity won.

More importantly, the Ethereum community collaborated openly on standards. ERC-20 for fungible tokens. ERC-721 for NFTs. ERC-4337 for smart accounts. These aren’t mandatory. Anyone can write contracts however they want. But the standards created shared infrastructure, shared tooling, shared understanding.

Now there are emerging standards for RWAs, gas sponsorship, intents, confidential payments. The pattern continues.

“Better” Fails Because Switching Costs Exceed Benefits

Here’s what alternative blockchain ecosystems get wrong: they see Solidity’s flaws and build “better” smart contract languages. They see Ethereum’s gas model and design “better” fee mechanisms. They see ERC standards and create “improved” versions.

This fails almost every time.

It fails because anyone building an incompatible alternative adds friction for developers already onboarded to Ethereum. Developers don’t want to learn new languages that do the same thing. They don’t want to rewrite working contracts. They don’t want to rebuild mental models.

The switching costs are too high and the benefits are too small.

Mindshare Saturated; FOMO Beats Technical Merit

Mindshare is saturated. There are too many blockchains, too many tokens, too many ecosystems demanding attention.

Developers and users choose what to engage with based on momentum and familiarity. FOMO drives decisions more than technical merit. Something that sounds like “yet another alternative to Ethereum standards” gets ignored, regardless of whether it’s actually better.

Even newer projects capturing attention often do so by staying compatible. Moonbeam built on Substrate but prioritized full Ethereum compatibility, letting developers deploy existing Solidity contracts unchanged. Base is an L2 that just runs Ethereum’s EVM.

Collaborate on Winning Standards, Not Isolated Stacks

Collaborate on winning standards instead of building isolated stacks.

JavaScript won and stayed relevant through standardization. Facebook won through network effects. Ethereum won through both: network effects of developers and users, plus standards that let the ecosystem grow without fragmentation.

If you’re building in a space with established standards, the default should be compatibility. The burden of proof is on incompatibility. “We can do better” is not enough. You need to be so much better that developers will pay the switching costs. That bar is higher than most people think.

The first movers already have distribution, tooling, documentation, community knowledge, and battle-tested implementations. To beat that, you usually need to find a different game rather than try to win the same one.