Web 3.0 needs more users, not more investors

The vast world of cryptocurrencies has always been made up of people who know money very well. After all, cryptocurrencies are financial products in their own right.

The paradigm-shifting elevator hype of Web 3.0 has always piqued investor interest, and over the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of money flow freely into the industry. These funds come in the form of direct investment, venture capital (VC), and now decentralized autonomous organizations (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) and indirect investments – institutional acquisitions of cryptocurrencies drive up token prices and support crypto-based funding for Web 3.0 projects.

We can expect to see more and more resources pouring into the Web 3.0 space over time, but more and more is the fact that there is no (monetary) resource shortage. What it has is a lack of products that are useful, appropriate, and appealing to mainstream audiences.

So far, Web 3.0 and cryptocurrencies have been mostly used by the classic early adopter population—the young and the tech-savvy. This is to be expected for any extremely disruptive technology. In the past, so did social media (Web 2.0) and even computers. When Meta (former Facebook) started out, college students were only invited to use the platform. When the “web” took its first breath, a list of known websites had to be maintained so that people could use it.

Sequencing encrypted DNA: finance, decentralization and democratization

Currently, most of us still live and work in a world where the ability to exchange and trade cryptocurrency tokens for fiat value is an important part of their functionality. This paradigm is likely to shift in the future, but for now, most people’s willingness to hold any given token comes down to their belief in its ability to outperform other assets in digital and other economies – incentives are financial.

These incentives have led to a large number of people who were not previously ordinary investors flocking to cryptocurrencies. The relatively low financial barriers to entry into the crypto market, coupled with the lure of stories about huge profits and crypto billionaires, have spawned a large class of retail investors in the cryptocurrency game. These retail investors are often the people who drive user numbers for many Web 3.0 products.

In most cases, the products themselves are directly related to the use of cryptocurrencies as investment and speculation vehicles: Uniswap (UNI), OpenSea and Aave (AAVE) are some of the most famous and popular Web 3.0 products, all of which are related to Buying and trading and gaining leverage on crypto assets are directly related. Of course, it makes sense that these products are popular, and their popularity drives them to be among the most refined in the entire space.

However, “investors” will always be a small fraction of the total population, so there will always be a limit to the number of people who can find value in something like Uniswap. For Web 3.0 to continue to grow in scale, adoption, and value, there needs to be a greater focus on creating products that ordinary people find value in every day of their lives. While this is an incredible innovation, Web 3.0, which focuses solely on finance, will never be a ubiquitous technology.

Replacing Web 2.0: Imitation and Innovation

Many Web 3.0 projects have made inroads by becoming “Web 2.0 platform replacements.” Web 3.0 has some distinct advantages over Web 2.0 that make them more appealing to a wider audience.

Some apps, like Odysee, offer creators and users a fairer platform than others — YouTube in this case. By eliminating the costs and overhead associated with middlemen and middlemen, Odysee is able to offer creators a larger profit share on its platform than competing Web 2.0 platforms like YouTube and Twitch.

Like Odysee, the Brave browser is also trying to create a fairer platform for its users — this time by overhauling the Web 2.0 advertising-based revenue model with a more private, transparent, and fair alternative.

Web 2.0 advertising is often intrusive in injecting the content we consume online and the privacy-invasive practices used to deliver targeted advertising. Brave ads don’t appear on webpages at all, but in the system notification tray. Ads are not targeted using a vast database of personal information, but are selected locally – so your personal information remains private. Not only that, but you can opt out of Brave advertising entirely if you wish. If you opt in, users will receive 70% of any fees paid by advertisers – creating a fairer, more private and transparent advertising system.

Other applications, such as Session messenger, take advantage of the benefits of decentralization to provide greatly improved privacy compared to centralized messengers. Using its network of staking service nodes, Session is able to provide more privacy and anonymity than any centralized competitor in a completely trustless manner.

Such applications play an important role in bringing mainstream users into the Web 3.0 future.Sessions alone will grow 500% in 2021 as users Ditch WhatsApp for more private alternatives. Brave is slowly establishing itself as a mainstream browser and currently has over 40 million users.

These things all have a few things in common: they are easy to use, they have clear advantages regardless of your interest in cryptocurrencies, and they do not require any major financial investment.

Why we need users: Improve products, add value

In tech, value is ultimately driven by users. In the end, if no one uses your technology, what’s the point?if Network 3.0 Still one of the fastest growing industries in the world, it needs users.

Despite all the benefits it offers, creating truly decentralized applications is far more complicated than their centralized alternatives. More users will help solve this problem because products with users can mature faster. As Session has grown, additional feedback, reports, and support from the community have greatly helped improve the real-world application. I’m sure other projects have discovered the same thing, and as their popularity has grown, everything has moved faster.

The next step for our industry should be to reach a critical user base as quickly as possible. Not only will this continue to drive growth and improvement in the app itself, it will also attract new investment into the space – more resources, more growth. The Web 3.0 train is moving faster than ever, but we’re still accelerating. If we want the wheels to continue turning, we should support and encourage projects that bring new mainstream audiences into the exciting world of Web 3.0.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.