From NFT to web 3.0, are leeks enough?

Source: Beijing Business Daily

After more than a year of low-key publicity, web 3.0 ignited the investment enthusiasm of VCs and entered the vision of ordinary entrepreneurs.

Web 3.0 refers to a decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain technology, which many believe represents the next phase of the internet and one of the biggest technology trends of 2022. According to Cryptopolitan data, in the first quarter of 2022, Web 3.0 startups have received more than $173 million in investment. The investment for the whole of 2020 was only $20 million.

There are many new concepts and fast upgrades. Before the future comes, before subverting the traditional Internet, Bitcoin, NFT, Metaverse, and web 3.0 should close their doors and “fight themselves”. It is also a derivative of the blockchain. Under the offensive of web 3.0, the metaverse, which had many fans yesterday, has suddenly become old-fashioned.

When Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a veteran bitcoin player, also dismissed web 3.0, the window to win the future slowly closed, leaving less time for the leeks to improve their self-cultivation.

People who have experienced the story of Bitcoin’s skyrocketing and plummeting should have some insight. In addition to seeing each other across the sea, they dare not face users and supervision in any case. After the price rises and falls, the value is calculated. Except for a few large exchanges, the blockchain has not yet seen a large-scale industrial scene.

So much so that some people pessimistically believe that virtual currency may be the only opportunity for blockchain.

Paradoxically, although the web 3.0 that emphasizes ecology and the currency circle and NFT where price is king, although they are all due to the blockchain, they are not linked together, and self-contradictory things are happening every day.

At the end of 2021, due to the IPO news, opensea, the largest overseas NFT trading platform, was boycotted by users, and initiated the opendao community to “tokenize” opensea assets to share them with users of the latter for free.

Although this is very decentralized in the spirit of web 3.0, it does not have the ability to control opensea under the actual legal and financial framework. In the final analysis, the current major virtual currency, NFT, and metaverse platforms are all centralized products in terms of technology and business logic, and their founders and investors have the most primitive Internet model to realize their needs.

More ironically, web 3.0 advocates the use of blockchain protocols to create an open community, allowing each user to control their own information assets. However, without the user scale, it is impossible to realize value realization. With the user scale, it means competition, which means the emergence of a large platform and a return to the centralized web 2.0.

Just like opendao, which restrains opensea, because of tokenization, it has fallen into the trap of price speculation. Who will “regulate” opendao? One dao community after another? In terms of technical logic, the ring is surrounded by a ring, and it has become a trap and a trap in terms of price.

Why so contradictory? Because of the above, even the blockchain itself does not have a clear technical route and industry template. Those who follow the trend of blockchain are right and wrong. What is right is the spirit of courage to explore, and what is wrong is the risk of closing your eyes and not mentioning it.

For the onlookers, the identification method is very simple, the value is not enough to make up the price, and the upside down of the price value is not a free business opportunity for wealth, but the bankruptcy of harvesting leeks.

Web 1.0 is the portal era, web 2.0 is the social era, what is the era of web 3.0? The author is not sure, but it should definitely not be a million-dollar NFT “Boring Monkey Yacht Club”, nor should it be a virtual real estate of 32 million yuan in the metaverse…