Web3 Actually Stands for Wild Wild West

Web3 Is a wild, wild world—and the blah, blah won’t make it easier to tame it.

The whole Web3 thing now feels the same way that Second Life did in 2006—Like we had all taken a big breath and we were all waiting for it to explode into something beyond our imagination—flying meetings, world-changing changing worlds, floating architecture and for me, a way to bring our advertising ideas to life in a vastly different way—to show our clients on something more than paper, to span time and space in a longitudinal 3D approach to communication architecture.

There is the same feeling in the air now—anticipation and curiosity—even a little bit of the old “Go West, Young Man†gumption and entrepreneurship of manifest destiny. And there are similarities— the land rush that made millionaires in Second Life is now an NFT art-rush. And the “AI-machines-are-taking-our-jobs freak-out†is similar to the worry back in 2006 that we’ll get addicted to Second Life, forgoing and ruining our “first lifeâ€.

But there are important differences as well… specifically that the metaverse is a hypothesized version of a virtual world built on the internet, whereas Web3 is a decentralized version of the internet that is built on blockchain technology. Think of it this way: the metaverse is a George Jetson flying car and Web3 is a real-life electric car that works on a completely different infrastructure.

I have to say that while I understand that Web2/Metaverse and Web3 are different, I don’t understand all of the minutia about decentralization, blockchain, ownership. But I’m “interning†with Joseph Jaffe at Alpha Collective (a web3 business about the business of web3), reading everything I can find, talking to everybody that will talk and taking a certificate class through MITSloan—so I have no doubt I’ll get there. But already I see some things that will affect brands and the fabled run to “250 million walletsâ€â€”assets, access and blah-blah I call it.

• Assets…for the consumer, getting involved/engaging in Web3 can be expensive and time consuming. We have millions and millions underbanked and unbanked and we want them to mine crypto and hope they keep their value? And, given that only 12% of creators (one of the key targets for Web3) make any money at all, that’s a tough ask.
• Access…There are a lot of numbers involved, but basically to get to the fabled 250 million wallets, you are going to need a lot more people with more access to the internet than now.
• Blah-blah…have you read any of the articles about Web3? Geez…talk about gobbledygook! Any “normie†like me would not only be bamboozled, but about three lines in would probably just give up. Currently there aren’t any simple, consumer-benefit oriented write-ups to help the market through the steps to understanding and adoption.

There are ways around it, but to get both the brands and the consumer to understand what decentralization means to them and what ownership of their data means to them, how the blockchain works for them…it’s going to take a lot of explanation, gamification and community-building—a vastly different type of branding than we have now. And I think it will be wild and wonderful, if we all don’t get distracted by the easy stuff.