As I discussed in my previous post about crypto, I’ve sat back and watched as Bitcoin went from novelty to investment. I observed all the chatter around blockchain and saw all sorts of startups raise initial coin offerings (ICO), including a number of projects that defrauding their investors, with founders running away with all the money. This past year was the year of the NFT and Twitter was abuzz with people excited about their new unique NFT profile pic that they bought on Ethereum.
As these major projects have blown up into the mainstream, crypto and blockchain have moved from the bleeding edge to the cutting edge, where more concrete opportunities are beginning to take shape. In fact, just this week, Metaplex Foundation raised $46 million from investors after just opening shop in 2021!
I am still very curious how they plan on making money as a business, as an open-source software group. This is going to be fascinating to watch.
So yeah, web3.
I mentioned this term in my crypto post because web3 is tying all of this crypto, blockchain, and NFT madness into a single idea. The future of the web is going to be built around technology, community, ownership, and decentralization. Past projects have led to a new internet culture that has moulded the web3 concept.
I won’t try to explain everything here, but Web 2.0 brought forward a massive amount of innovation. However, it also led to a centralization of power and influence by a small group of tech companies, namely Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. The biggest names keep getting bigger and are consolidating more and more of the money that exists online.
The idea is that web3 will open up opportunity for internet users to have a greater share in ownership of the web, thus funneling money away from the giants and to regular people.
It’s a little unnerving because everything is so new and there aren’t clear processes or best practices on how to build a startup in this evolving ecosystem. It’s a bit intimidating but also a very exciting.
I still need to find an underlying need or problem to solve, but the possibilities on how I implement those changes are to be discovered, considering how fundamentally different the web3 approach is.
It’s no longer about capturing users and their data, but also on creating community with your most passionate users and working together with them to build the next greatest thing.
I admit that this post has been a bit scatterbrained. I plan on having more structure going forward, but my head is full of so many ideas right now.
I will end it with a couple of thoughts. As mentioned above, entrepreneurs still need to discover a niche where they can make a difference and build something great.
These are the areas that I am most keenly focused on right now, and I am exploring solutions with web3 in mind:
We need to expand the ability for people to access capital.
People need better ways to share earnings gained through their work in web3.
I am spending more time focused on the latter point, and accomplishing that will help open up more opportunities to focus on the first one.