What’s next in web3? 🧵
First, where are we today? Let’s start with some anecdotes.
We have an awesome games team led by @Tocelot that invests in founders out of top game studios like Riot, Epic, Blizzard etc. Almost 100% of founders they’ve met with recently are exploring NFTs in some way, or are already building NFTs into their games
I get regular emails like this from web2 founders (this is verbatim the other day from a top web2 founder) “Hey Chris, hope all is well. I’m going deeper on crypto and now understand why it’s so exciting.” I expect others in web3 are seeing a similar wave of new talent entering.
So what’s next for web3?
Expect many NFT-based games to launch, developed by founders with backgrounds at top game studios. Some of these will launch as soon as next month, others will take longer.
Expect many more creators to embrace NFTs in their own communities as they discover how much better they can monetize by selling digital goods directly to their fans vs banner ads and other web2 monetization methods.
New web3 users who earn tokens through games and NFTs will likely choose to save those tokens in DeFi protocols vs tradfi banks given the better rates and user experience, growing the number of DeFi users.
Web3 infrastructure will continue to improve, with the continued improvement and growth of non-Ethereum L1s and Ethereum L2s. The Ethereum merge will hopefully happen in Q1 22. This will improve performance and also remove the environmental objection to using Ethereum.
Expect many more experiments with DAOs, social tokens, decentralized social networks, web3 media, and other emerging categories. Some of these might break out the way NFTs and web3 games did earlier this year.
It’s an exciting time to be in web3. If you want to get involved, there are many job openings at web3 companies. Email us at web3-jobs@a16z.com
