Is big tech entering Web3 good or bad for the industry?

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode [Music] gm gm welcome friends back to another episode of web 3 academy i am kyle read head here by myself today and i'm going to talk about is big tech entering web 3 good or bad for the industry i've written an article on this so you are more than welcome to read the article as well it is in the show notes below so feel free to read if you like that otherwise i'm going to read it for you and

dive into a little bit more details in context now before i do that if you are someone that's looking to work in web 3 which i highly recommend you do web 3 jobs are almost all remote web 3 jobs pay more they also usually get you some tokens which can be nice depending on where you work and it also puts you in just one of the most innovative fastest growing industries um that are available today right if there is any space that you want to get into it is web 3 because you will be one of the early people in it and it will allow you to grow and have so much opportunity in the future as this industry builds out if that is you if you want to get into web3 or you just want to talk to companies and see if it's a right fit

for you join our web3 doer collective we have created a platform for you it is free where all you do is join in you create a profile and we are going to be hand picking all of the top companies uh and job opportunities in this space and directing them literally right to this collective so they can scan through and look for who are the people that they need so if you're a marketer if you're a community manager if you're a designer um if you are a writer if you are a developer of course if you are a product manager um whatever it is that you do join in there and um the show notes are or sorry the link is in the show notes below you can join it it takes you like i don't know a couple minutes to create your profile uh and you will literally

have some of the top companies message you and reaching out to you about potential opportunities at their companies so if you are looking for a job in web 3 or you're just open to like seeing what's out there follow the links below and just sign up create yourself a profile i promise you it's going to be an amazing opportunity for you if you're a web three company by the way and you're hiring um well there's gonna be all these people signing up and uh that are great professionals that are experienced in web3 because they listen to up to your academy go in and you can also apply to be a part of this collective so that you can reach out to these people it's also a job board there um so if you're looking for a job you can actually just go and look we already have jobs

available and uh and again if you're a company you can put your jobs on there as well um our whole goal here is just to connect and onboard web two people uh into web three uh into web3 companies so again make sure to check that out we're super excited about that opportunity and uh and again join our discord which is in the show expo too if you have questions if you need help we are here to connect and get people jobs in web3 so uh we'll see you there and thank you guys for for signing up and joining that it's going to be a great experience for everyone so is big tech entering web 3 good or bad for the industry we're seeing big tech entering right now right so let's talk about the presence of big tech and

web 3. instagram twitter reddit they have all launched features utilizing web3 tools like nfts and tokens already right and many others like shopify youtube and spotify have announced it's in the works and it is coming soon big tech is here and they are bringing their billions of dollars and billions of users with them but is this a good thing for web3 isn't the promise of web3 to create a fair and equal internet for everyone to create an internet free from you know centralized organizations surely the tech giants of the world won't follow the ethos of crypto and web 3 right won't they do what they always do and just squeeze as much profit as possible from anywhere they can well in this episode here we're going to

dive into what big tech entering web3 means for its users and uh and for the industry at large okay so let's start first um just getting clear on the promise of web3 if you are in the web3 space you know you're probably excited there's a lot happening there's money to be made there's innovation but like really what are we doing here what is the purpose and the promise of web 3 and this i hope you guys really understand because this is really important really digital ownership and interoperability are the true unlocks of web3 that's really what we're doing here okay web3 enables us to connect into applications with our self custody account okay you can think of this also as a wallet your crypto wall your web

three wallet and allows us to connect uh into these applications rather than create an account which is owned by that application web3 enables us to own our data that is in that account right and the data that we create by you know um searching the internet or just doing whatever it is we do inside of these applications what web 3 enables is us to own our data and choose what we share with the applications that we interact with rather than them owning that data and owning that account web3 enables us to own the assets that we create that we earn and that we purchase inside of these applications as well and now because of these three features

it allows us to be free from sort of the stranglehold of big tech companies like facebook and google if we don't like what their applications or their companies are doing we can just simply disconnect from them at any time and bring all of those things our account our data our assets with us with zero friction right so web 3 gives us a choice to go where we are treated best it puts the power in the hands of the users rather than the centralized companies and this is the true promise of web3 this is the most exciting thing and we'll talk about why that's really important in a second but here's what you need to understand about this with big tech entering big tech can't take control over web 3.

that's the beauty of this right they don't stand a chance and now that's not to say that they won't do well and find ways to make unbelievable profits because of course they're going to do that what i'm saying is they can't take away the foundations of digital ownership and interoperability and if they try to then they're just in the same place that they started they're just back in web 2. right so for example this is i'm going to try to explain this in the best way i can but if meta decides to utilize nfts but does it in such a way that we don't custody our assets or the nfts are on some centralized blockchain owned by meta well then simply put this isn't web3 right they just rebuilt their existing platform but on a less efficient

database it makes no sense from a user standpoint of course but now maybe users don't get that we don't understand it maybe it's a better ux over on facebook's or meta side so we do anyway but more importantly it makes no sense from a business standpoint on meta side here's why right the easiest way to think about a blockchain is as a glorified database which is owned and controlled by no one right a database that also cannot be changed or altered any way it is essentially a permissionless ledger right which is unlike the databases commonly used today which are hosted on a centralized server by a centralized company which can be altered changed in permission at any time they please

right so everything we do on facebook and on instagram and on twitter and whatever it's all just databases when we create an account we just go into facebook's database which again they own that database it's on their servers okay when we post content it just goes into a database all facebook is is a ux experience to show that data to show what you're posting etc okay and so if meta decided to launch nfts in meta's centralized database well of course it wouldn't actually be an nft it would just be a jpeg right just like we have jpegs today already on facebook and instagram right so remember the only reason nfcs actually are nfts non-fungible tokens or

that they hold any value is because of the properties that permissionless and decentralized blockchains provide verifiable ownership and digital scarcity right without those properties it's not an nft and it doesn't hold any value which is exactly where things are already today in web 2. so there's no purpose there's no reason there's no business case for facebook to create their own version of an nft because it just wouldn't be an nft they already have that right an nft is just a picture right it's just the difference here in web 3 is that it's stored on the blockchain which allows you to self-custody and own it and then in the web 2 world again it's

just a picture it's an identical picture it's just it's not stored in a blockchain it's stored in a centralized database which doesn't allow you to self-custody it so facebook isn't going to go and create a new version of an nft on something that they custody because that's just what they already have right hopefully you can you can see that um clear there but big tech is going to create their own blockchains with their own versions they already have that there is no new product there and as much as we might hate big tech they are smart enough to understand this fact right after all they are called big tech for a reason they understand the trends of technology and capitalizing better than anyone else does

and so how does big tech capitalize on web3 then well think about this decentralized and permissionless blockchains like ethereum are unstoppable right um it is it is a new internet economy that offers a better product than anything that exists today on the internet that product is block space okay which is permissionless and trustless uh and it means of moving and storing digital value okay permissions and trustless means of moving and storing digital value now because of its open nature any person any company any country can use this block space for whatever they please whenever they please right a centralized company with rules and

regulations and jurisdictions they can't compete with that it's just not possible right facebook and all these other companies they have rules that they have to abide by they can't let certain countries use their products right because that's just the rules of whatever's going on in this centralized world in a decentralized world none of that matters anyone can use this and that is obviously a way better product than you know the former so what this means for big tech to enter web 3 is they will need to plug into existing blockchains and find new ways to generate revenue rather than create their own blockchains and i think it's obvious that big tech

already realizes they can't they cannot own users assets in this world whether that be nfts tokens like erc20s or anything else which is stored in the blockchain which again accounts profile pictures social content uh whatever kind of user data et cetera and the reason we see this is i guess obvious already is it's already becoming a reality right both instagram and twitter have elected to plug into ethereum and interact with the nfts that exist on ethereum that their users self-custody rather than create their own centralized versions so this is a great start to big tech entering web3 this is big tech instagram and twitter already telling us hey we can't compete here these decentralized open permissionless

blockchains are better than what we can do so what we're going to do is try to plug into them right and so what big tech can do in web 3 is provide services applications and experiences for users to utilize their assets as well as facilitate things like onboarding and ux and web3 right because everything in web 3 is about transacting and moving some form of value well then they can take a percent cut from these transactions there is money moving which means they can skim off the top and the easiest example to see this happening already is openc right the largest nft marketplace in web

3. now this is not considered big tech not yet anyway we'll see where they go it is a centralized company though which created a service for users with digital assets so openc does not own or custody any of the user accounts or assets right they didn't create a blockchain or create nfts it just simply provides an interface for users to create buy and sell their own nfts which exist on ethereum and polygon and other blockchains so with openc the users are still full control and ownership of their nft but what happens is anytime you do anything on openc anytime value is moved openc takes a two and a half percent cut

off every transaction inside its platform which is fair i mean two and a half percent is nothing compared to what most you know if you think of apple if you want to you know if you buy something like an app on apple or whatever they take like 30 something percent which is insane right um so 2.5 is actually is actually nothing sub stack for example which is like you know your your um a newsletter platform takes 10 of all revenue now that's still even fairly low but 2.5 is great and so as it goes in web 3 users are free to leave open c and use other nft marketplaces like looks rare or wearable or something else

right because there's no friction to leave like there would be in leaving i don't know instagram or twitter because you can simply just disconnect your wallet from openc and connect to the next nft marketplace and those assets that were on openc or that were listed on openc you can just move them over to looks rare or move them over to wearable right and your data your account all that just moves with you you're not stuck inside that platform like we are today with instagram and twitter and all these other um platforms so this is how centralized companies in my opinion will work alongside these new features that have been added to the internet and what i mean here is digital ownership and interoperability now what's really cool about this is this is

going to really change the power distribution of the internet so the question is how does web3 redistribute the power of big tech okay hopefully you can already see what's happening here but the idea that users own their digital assets it can bring them in and out of any application is is actually profound it's a huge huge unlock what this means is that companies now need to play nice they no longer have total control and can do whatever they want like they can today a company's number one focus moving forward will have to be giving the users what they want otherwise a competitor will do it and their users will leave easy as that right the dynamics have completely changed competition will be fierce as a result it will be a race to provide

better and cheaper products here the easiest example openc i just gave you right people have been using opencv for a while it's easily the biggest in the space to you know to sell and buy and exchange nfts well all of a sudden looks rare came out and they said hey well we're basically the same thing as openc but we're gonna give you these looks tokens or actually i think they were giving eth tokens instead so it's like you use our stuff and we'll pay you to use it right now if if twitter or someone else said that and we were on instagram we still couldn't really move over there especially if we have a lot of followers on instagram we can't just like go i'll go over to twitter and start tweeting or posting pictures there because i'll make you know a couple cents each post well if your business

relies on your followers you have an instagram you're screwed right but here everyone's like oh sweet i'll just go over looks rare and i'll list it there instead i can still sell my assets there's no difference i just move my account over here and boom it was seamless you could just do it and look for it took off and they had tons of users right off the bat just because of that move and so that was competition right there now does looks rare win in the long run no idea openc is still winning but it's the it's that that opportunity is there right now openc i think still provides a better service um in a better ux because looks rare is new it's just the idea that you can move so easily if you wanted to and so what this means that competition is about to

really heat up in the space and you got to do everything you can for your users to keep them around and so what i believe happens here is it's not just about creating a better product though that is obviously going to be a huge aspect of it it will also be a race to share ownership and governance with users as users who own the products or have a say in the direction of the products will of course become more incentivized to stick around and remain a user right we sort of understand this in like the web 2 world with like credit card points right if you have like i don't know a credit card for a gas station people will go out of their way to go to that gas station even though there's one that's like right beside their house or

like right on the road that they're on but go to the other one because they know they can get rewards right well this is the same thing here with web3 is companies or protocols whatever can start to give you rewards to use its products and now because you own that obviously you are going to want that company to do well because you own some of its equity and maybe that equity is also a governance token where you can vote on the direction of that and if you are someone who is using let's say facebook or whatever i'm just using web two examples i think this doesn't happen there it happens over some sort of web 3 protocol but let's just for example say you're on facebook and you have you know 500 000 followers

and you built a business based off that well you really want facebook to do well because that's where you have most of the action and now if you own tokens of that and you can vote on the direction of that well you're going to continue to use that platform and you're probably going to promote it to others too right and so now you're not just a user but you're an owner of it and i think it makes sense for platforms to start distributing the ownership the equity and the governance to their users because that's what's going to keep them around that's what's going to make it sticky it's no longer just you're forced to stay here because your account is here and you can't do anything about it now it's like well i got to do something that keep these people here and so creating better products giving

ownership giving governance these are going to be the things that keep people there and so the power and the value in turn is distributed across the community rather than just the you know the ceo or the the the um the board of directors or whoever right so be very interesting to see how this all plays out in the coming years in my opinions i think this has big implications far beyond just big tech right and i'm looking at you big government right a lot of what we talk about here with big tech and all this i see similarities in in nation states and in countries especially as someone who's remote and works remote i live in a lot of different countries and i've learned a lot about how there are many countries which are giving tax benefits so that

people will leave their existing country or drop their residency existing countries and go to places like dubai and portugal and in the bahamas et cetera because they're treated better there in terms of tax right so you already see it kind of playing it now it's harder in the nation-state uh competition because like it's physical and people have homes and you know jobs and things like that in their physical place you can't just move around as easy like you can in these digital worlds um but it's the same kind of thing you can go where you're treated best and i think that's really going to be the huge sort of competition in tech and this will be true of social but it'll be true of everything i think it'll be true of all protocols and all

technologies and things that we do i think tokens will be at the forefront of it all and we will start to have this ownership economy where we own the things that we use and do and and are on um and that to me is very very exciting so my final thoughts i'm excited for big tech to enter web3 right they have billions of dollars billions of users and most importantly we talk about this a lot in web3 academy is they have hundreds of thousands of developers and the best product and ux designers in the world right it is these companies that can give web3 the ux that it needs in addition to seamlessly onboarding billions of users into this base okay our ux and web 3 is not great and it's getting better slowly but

surely but look the experts are at web in the web 2 companies in big tech that's why they're a big tech and the more and they already are but the more they come over to web 3 and help web 3 improve their ux the better this all gets and it's coming right i mean we already see it look at instagram plugging into um into ethereum with their nfts they don't call it nfts they call it digital collectibles and as much as that's just a change in words these are the things that we need in ux these are the improvements we need right because no one cares about the word nft we do right now but like we're never going to use that word it's a terrible word non-fungible token do you really think that's something we're going to use uh in normal you know conversations with mainstream people

absolutely not but digital collectible well that makes sense to someone my mom can understand what digital collectible is and who's the first person to do that instagram right you don't see anyone in the web 3 space that's native web 3 calling it digital collectible we call it nft we talk about blockchain we talk about the confusing stuff that people don't care about the mainstream people don't care about so i think the product that's just an easy example but i think the product designers um and ux designers from web 2 world coming in is going to be so massive for us but while web3 does not need big tech to achieve adoption it will definitely help it's definitely going to speed things up okay which again is why i started this off saying hey if you are in the web 2 world and you want to move into web 3

we need your help i'm serious web3 needs your help whether you are a community manager you are a product designer you are just a designer a developer a product manager you know whatever skill you have in the web 2 world i'm telling you right now that web 3 needs it and web3 will pay you more they'll be more lenient you're going to work with way cooler people more excited people more passionate people so look don't wait because the earlier you start working in web 3 the more that you get to the top and you become a leader in the space there are not a lot of experienced leaders in web three anyone who has any sort of experience in web three can basically get a job at any company they want

right because it's still so new and there are going to be thousands of web 3d projects built and started in the next year probably and tens of thousands in the years to come and you have an opportunity to be at the forefront of that so again if you want to work in web 3 check out the link in the comments below and join our collective where we you can sign up and make a profile and we will connect you with many of the top companies in the space um so again web3 does not need big tech to achieve adoption okay knowing and understanding the foundational changes to the internet that blockchain technology provides we can be confident that big tech will have to play by the rules and put the users first this time around that's the

exciting part here and so that said i'm sure they will find a way to mess this one up you know human greed is always finds a way in um but like i said we don't need big tech so if they do find a way to screw it up who cares right we don't need them but i'll tell you one thing big tech sure as hell needs us we are the users and without the users big tech doesn't exist okay so i think big tech coming to space is very very good and i think they play nice because what else are they going to do they have to they have no other choice well friends that's my article i hope that you liked it i hope that you enjoyed that conversation um if you have questions please join our discord

and feel free to reach out uh reach out either on twitter i'm just call.kylereadhead r-e-i-d-h-e-a-d follow me on twitter i tweet a lot um and i will just tweet me a question tweet me your opinions if you disagree with anything i said i'd love to hear that so do it on twitter or feel free to join in the conversation over in our discord we have a web3 academy discord uh where we talk a lot about these podcasts and articles and just everything else happening in the space and so again we're just trying to cultivate a community and be a place where we all get to learn from each other so if that's you if you're excited about web3 if you're passionate join in introduce yourself on our discord um and uh and even join in one of our um weekly events so every monday at 7 pm est you can hang out with

jay my co-host as well as myself and we can talk about the things that we're discussing on podcasts so we'd love to have you in there and chat that's 7 p.m est on mondays every monday inside of our discord friends thank you so much for listening and please share like review all the things for us on youtube spotify whatever it is that you're listening on please help us grow this thing we need you we need the users just like big tech needs the users uh thank you all my wife through academy doers you are the best and i will see you in the next episode thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss

the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets in price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one