Although some of you may not have been born in the era I’m about to describe, drawing parallels between Web3 and the early days of the Internet is enlightening in several ways.
In the early 90s, the Internet was not yet well known to the general public, but it was portrayed as a kind of giant encyclopedia, global, universal, and freely accessible. Libraries and prestigious universities have made some of the content on their shelves available, giving everyone access to a much broader knowledge base than a single person can absorb in a lifetime.
For everyone, Really? Not necessarily. At that time, accessing the Internet was somewhat of an obstacle for those trying it out. They were considered adventurers, or even pioneers, and for many it was almost a miracle to set up an Internet connection before surfing through millions of pages of text.
I had to buy a modem and join an ISP (Internet Service Provider) who would send me a connectivity kit that I needed to configure correctly to witness the magic happen. Some people still remember the modem’s carrier signal that accompanied the connection attempt.
If successful, the navigation was very slow and unreliable, but it didn’t matter because content and information from all over the world could now be accessed through the computer screen. This was a revolution.
This first iteration of the Internet, with the birth of the World Wide Web and the rise of email, quickly transformed into a tool of instant communication, giving voice to all parties and visitors. Anyone can create their own girlfriend website, share their daily life in words and photos, and interact with readers. Then came social media.
It took about 10 years for this technological invention to become popular among the general public as a tool that does not require special knowledge. In the meantime, I’m not going to list all the mainstream press articles and media interviews that have described the Internet as a gadget, a fiasco meant to excite a few geeks, a bubble with no future.
A tool for communication and a connection to a whole ecosystem of applications that allows us to stay in touch with the world, family and friends, to entertain, inform and educate ourselves. . No one is talking about TCP/IP or any of the other protocols that were the vectors of the Internet anymore. At most, we’re talking about bandwidth for faster access, but connecting to the Internet is surprisingly easy. Even grandma can connect from her mobile phone.
In just a few years, the Internet has become indispensable to a large portion of the world’s population, and some people are demanding that the Internet be elevated to the level of an essential need.
Blockchain technology, which allows unforgeable information to be recorded on a distributed ledger that anyone can access, is also essentially a technological innovation.
Even today, you need to be familiar with some tools and terminology (among the small portion of the population that understands what it is, those who are happy to make themselves incomprehensible) There are some).
An ecosystem is gradually being built around this tool to accommodate increasingly diverse use cases.
“What could blockchain do better than what currently exists?”
“Can blockchain solve this or that problem?”
“Can we use blockchain to make this or that more secure?”
These are the questions that those building on the foundation of blockchain are currently grappling with – perhaps without even realizing it – in order to create the ecosystems that ordinary people will use tomorrow.
In 5 years, will we still be talking about MetaMask, ETH, interoperability, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, gas fees, and even tokens instead of Solana?
So, unsurprisingly, we’re flooded with articles predicting the stillbirth of NFTs, blockchain, and the bursting of the crypto bubble (the journalists are a bit lacking in foresight and write articles on a daily basis). Traditional financial institutions and even governments are concerned about the situation and are hesitant to legislate.
Technological innovation is ongoing (just look at the rise of AI) and is only accelerating when it comes to mass adoption. The architects of tomorrow’s world, of which we humbly claim to be a part, are building platforms that advance human survival, simplify access to technology, and enable everyone to benefit. We develop tools, ecosystems.
After all, it’s similar to the early internet.
As for whether we should still be talking about Web3 and NFTs, I’ll leave these ego arguments to the fame-seeking marketers…
