Web3 concepts such as blockchain technology, crypto assets and NFTs, are slowly but surely infiltrating the corridors of Big Business.
Whether we’re talking about Nike’s new blockchain-based.Swoosh platform aiming to “expand the definition of sport” by “democratising the web3 experience so that everyone can collect, create and own a piece of this new digital world”, or PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Decentraland virtual space, companies are looking beyond the buzzword.
But not everyone is impressed with the Web3 concept, including one of the greatest disruptors of all time.
Tim Berners Lee, the British scientist broadly considered the inventor of the World Wide Web, told us to “ignore the Web3 stuff,” at this month’s Web Summit 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal.
In fact, ‘dismissive’ was probably the best way to sum up sentiment towards Web3 in Lisbon as a whole.
Software engineer Molly White didn’t hide her disdain for crypto and blockchain technology when she took to the stage.
“So many problems in today’s web are driven by capitalistic forces driving ruthlessly towards the enrichment of monopolistic tech companies rather than the betterment of society,” went White’s missive.
“You’ll have to excuse me for doubting that our utopian web dreams will be achieved through the introduction of a hyper-capitalistic technology that aims to financialise everything on the web even further, and exposes user data on public ledgers where it can be scraped by even more tech companies than are profiting off data today,” she continued after a big breath.
White wasn’t finished: “There will be a Web3… Will it be blockchains and crypto? Venture capitalists and blockchain startup founders really hope that you think so.”
For more of White biting sarcasm, her blog “Web3 is Going Just Great...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smouldering planet” is a goldmine.
Berners-Lee’s Web3 scepticism is built on the same foundations as White’s.
“Blockchain protocols may be good for some things but they’re not good for Solid,” said Berners-Lee, referring to his new web decentralisation project that successfully raised US$30mln in funding last December.
Blockchain is “too slow too expensive and too public,” for Berners-Lee, while “personal data stores have to be fast, cheap and private”.
“Ignore the Web3 stuff, random Web3 that was built on blockchain, we’re not using that for Solid,” he said in order to drill his point home.
But Web3 is seemingly taking over the conversation, despite robust protestations from certain gatekeepers.
Whether that conversation is full of hot air is another argument entirely.
Anarchy in the Web3
“We’re taking from the anarchist but are also disrupting the disrupters, we mature the technology and bring it to the Fortune 500, because I think that is needed,” said Lone Fønss Schrøder, chief executive of blockchain company Concordium and vicechair of Volvo Cars.
Schrøder takes quite a different view to Berners-Lee, White et al.
“Corporations will tumble unless they adopt new tech such as Web3,” reckons Schrøder. She is in a good position to comment.
On top of being the head of an early-stage blockchain company, Schrøder sits on the board of some of Europe’s largest corporations, including the aforementioned Volvo, IKEA Group and Aker.
The biggest problem in the corporate world, according to Schrøder, is that by not realising Web3’s potential because the tech is difficult to understand and belongs to a new generation, “companies are often their own biggest competitor”.
History could be on her side.
According to a 2019 McKinsey study, the average lifespan of the average S&P 500 company was 61 years in 1958.
Today, it is less than 18 years, and forecasts suggest that 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared by 2027.
Companies are now dying as teenagers.
Just as startling is the median age of S&P’s top-ten companies: 85 years in 2000, only 33 years in 2018.
Clearly, we’re living in an era of disruption but, for Schrøder, corporate culture “makes it very hard for corporations to take in new technologies and do it fast,” even if ignorance could spell their demise.
There is another side to the argument though.
Web3 has yet to prove itself and if it ends up being a giant waste of time, companies risk diverting precious time and attention to a buzzword with little underlying worth.
That is certainly the opinion of Tom Goodwin, author of Digital Darwinism, in regard to the metaverse.
But Web3 is a broad church encompassing crypto, blockchain and NFT systems, and we’re are far too early in the journey to fully understand its true potential and use cases.
I recall the first time my house got dial-up 56k modem internet. It was slow, expensive and stupidly inefficient, yet it felt revolutionary. These terms are now being attributed to Web3.
Yet Web3 is not even close to ‘phase dial-up’. True, businesses need to move with the technological tide, but putting your eggs into the Web3 basket remains a gamble with unquantified odds.
When decentralisation?
For all of Web3’s espousing of decentralisation, it by and large remains a pipedream.
Schrøder’s Concordium project is no different, given that the Concordikum foundation is a majority holder of the blockchain’s CCD token, and even runs 10 out f the ~300 validation nodes that help secure the blockchain.
It’s a conundrum ubiquitous in the Web3 space: How do you balance decentralisation with running an actual functioning product?
“It’s no trivial thing,” agreed Schrøder, but that doesn’t mean decentralisation isn’t relevant for certain applications, “but the tech and governance modes must mature, as well as the regulative part of Web 3 solutions”.
Schrøder’s experience cuts across corporate and Web3 line -- Credit: Concordium
“We know from speaking to other foundations who are already on the road towards decentralisation who have done it, in their words, a little too fast without understanding the consequences,” said Schrøder, adding: “Decentralisation can’t be rolled back unless the ecosystem decides so.”
It’s as if decentralisation is Web3’s event horizon- there’s no going back once you make the leap.
Speaking of leaps, no one needs reminding that Meta Platforms – formerly Facebook (NASDAQ:META) – has thrown the body of its diminishing workforce and ten billion dollars and counting into the metaverse.
Whether it gets sucked into a black hole or goes supernova is anyone’s guess, but one thing is for sure: Meta will serve as either a benchmark or portent for companies like Concordium that see Web3 as the future of interconnectivity.
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