Many companies are testing the Web3 waters, and while some have enjoyed major successes, several high-profile firms are finding that they (or their customers) don’t like the temperature. Meanwhile, businesses and leaders are trying to make sense of the potential - and pitfalls - of a rapidly changing landscape that could pay serious dividends to organizations that get it right. A growing chorus of skeptics warns that Web3 is rotten with speculation, theft, and privacy problems, and that the pull of centralization and the proliferation of new intermediaries is already undermining the utopian pitch for a decentralized web. For all its promise, blockchain faces significant technical, environmental, ethical, and regulatory hurdles between here and hegemony. Or is it? While it’s undeniable that energy, money, and talent are surging into Web3 projects, remaking the web is a major undertaking. Like the Marvel villain Thanos, Web3 is inevitable. Advocates argue that Web3 will create new economies, new classes of products, and new services online that it will return democracy to the web and that is going to define the next era of the internet. In theory, a blockchain-based web could shatter the monopolies on who controls information, who makes money, and even how networks and corporations work. The totality of these efforts is called “Web3.” The moniker is a convenient shorthand for the project of rewiring how the web works, using blockchain to change how information is stored, shared, and owned.
Advocates of DeFi (or “decentralized finance,” which aims to remake the global financial system) are lobbying Congress and pitching a future without banks. One DAO recently raised $47 million in an attempt to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Even more esoteric cousins, such as DAOs, or “ decentralized autonomous organizations,” operate like headless corporations: They raise and spend money, but all decisions are voted on by members and executed by encoded rules. Beeple, for example, caused a sensation last year when an NFT of his artwork sold for $69 million at Christie’s. NFTs have exploded in 2022, conjuring a $41 billion market seemingly out of thin air. Blockchain is now being deployed to new ends: for instance, to create “digital deed” ownership records of unique digital objects - or nonfungible tokens.
The underlying technology, blockchain, is what’s called a “distributed ledger” - a database hosted by a network of computers instead of a single server - that offers users an immutable and transparent way to store information. Thomas Stackpole is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.Ĭrypto, however, is just the tip of the spear. What was first a curiosity and then a speculative niche has become big business. Until suddenly Larry David was pitching them during the Super Bowl stars like Paris Hilton, Tom Brady, and Jamie Foxx were hawking them in ads and a frankly terrifying Wall Street–inspired robot bull celebrating cryptocurrency was unveiled in Miami. Amidst all the demands on our attention, many of us didn’t notice cryptocurrencies slowly seeping into the mainstream. Bitcoin never had a future alongside real tech companies, they’d contend, and then they’d forget about it and move on with their lives.īitcoin now seems to be everywhere.
Each time it does, skeptics rush to dismiss it as dead, railing that it was always a scam for nerds and crooks and was nothing more than a fringe curiosity pushed by techno-libertarians and people who hate banks. Every year or two, bitcoin’s value has tanked. Most likely, soon after Bitcoin came to your attention - whenever that may have been - there was a crash. Maybe you just wondered whether your company should be working on a crypto strategy in case it did take off in your industry, even if you didn’t really care one way about it or the other. Perhaps you felt a tingle of FOMO as the folks who got in early suddenly amassed a small fortune - even if it wasn’t clear what the “money” could legitimately be spent on (really expensive pizza?). Do you remember the first time you heard about Bitcoin? Maybe it was a faint buzz about a new technology that would change everything.
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