Sometimes it feels like people throw the word “Web3” & “blockchain” around like they used to throw [insert random idea here] domain names around during the dotcom craze in the late 1990’s. Back then everything sounded like a good idea & investment opportunity because how could something like pets.com possibly fail and wipe out $147m in less than 9 months? The reality is nothing much has changed and people love using buzz words to create a quick buck or try their hand at some pie in the sky idea. Unfortunately a large percentage of startups fail and I think too many of them get funded too early and don’t go through the trials and tribulations that battle harden people to prepare them to be able to fight savagely to survive if needed.
But out of the fire also come some real winners, look at Amazon for example. Early on I remember thinking “this Jeff Bezos guy is going to lose everybody’s money” because he wants to sell books online when you can now just download a PDF and it’s hard enough to get regular people to buy anything online, let alone books. But the media just portrayed him as “the guy with the online book store” but if you were lucky enough to have heard his big picture plan you would soon understand that he had a much greater vision and selling books was the ant trail into a niche market that was underserved and easy to capture. In 2006 Amazon took the punt into cloud computing and it paid off handsomely with only 12% of the income coming from cloud but it accounts for almost 60% of their operating income because selling & delivering physical products is a low margin business but cloud compute at scale is extremely profitable.
But how does all this tie back into Web3 and the title of the article? Well we need to know where trends are heading, what people are wanting and it helps if you find projects that are “stubborn on vision, but flexible on details”. A lot of Web3 is about decentralisation and taking power away from the large monopolistic companies and putting a bit more control into your own pocket. There are some great projects in the DeFi, DAO, IOT, NFT space ect but the one that I think doesn’t get enough coverage is some of the decentralised services.
Sure a decentralised network of random peoples computers networked together to access each other’s storage and computing power doesn’t sound like it is going to be as fast or reliable as a paid cloud service so how could it possibly be a threat to the major cloud providers? The moment you decentralised storage or compute power you throw speed out the window but what you gain is massive redundancy, massive scalability & zero infrastructure cost. But what can you possibly do with a cluster of devices all connected to each other, as anyone from the late 90’s to early 2000’s will tell you TORRENT!
Now we are not talking about piracy here, we are talking about the ability to access encrypted content and files from nodes that are more local rather than having to tunnel all the way back to the large cloud server that is sometimes in high demand and on the other side of the world. So what would a Web3 torrent look like . . . well that’s video streaming. More than 82% of all traffic over the internet is video traffic and the cost to deliver that information from source to the end user is arguably the largest portion of your streaming service subscription. It is unlikely that these Web3 services will overtake the likes of Netflix or Prime in the near future but the moment Netflix comes to the realisation they could use a Web3 service like Rewarded TV or Theta TV to distribute media and cut their AWS bill by 90+% they might just switch over.
Big players like Sony & Samsung have already partnered with Theta Network to start looking at implementing these services into their TV’s not just to stream content but also distribute content. Imagine while you are watching Season 4 of Friends on your TV you are picking it up off someone else’s TV that is just down the road while you simultaneously earning rewards for streaming Season 12 of The Simpsons off your TV. Naturally you have opted in to be an uploader because you want to have a discounted subscription and the content is encrypted so you have no idea what is truly being distributed from your network but all content is curated via the streaming service so you know it is all legitimate and above board.
I have used Theta for over a year and just started using Rewarded TV and I can say hand on heart it is every bit just as good as the other streaming services with similar load times and I have noticed less buffering on Reward TV than I do on some of my paid cloud based streaming services. So when looking at projects don’t just look at what they are achieving right now, look at what their big picture & long term vision is and see if they have a founder that is going to be resilient enough to take a blow from a battle axe but clever enough to know when to pivot.
There are a handful of great projects out there solving some of the world’s biggest problems but being able to cut through the hype and discern if it’s achievable by that project or just another pet project is often the challenge. Some of the real up and coming stars are often too small and too busy building so they don’t get the publicity they probably deserve until it’s too late to get in on it, so always keep your ears open for the subtle sounds of innovation.
