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Silicon Valley innovations have helped bring computers, the Internet and smartphones to traditional consumers, forever changing the way we work and communicate. Along the way, it has built an astonishing amount of capital, with a total annual economic output of around $ 275 billion, according to one estimate, surpassing the entire country of Finland.
But while Silicon Valley had once been invested in innovation and disruption, its largest companies – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft – are now primarily concerned with keeping themselves extremely profitable and powerful and fending off threats to their tight grip on user data and privacy. Of course, this is their mandate as dictated by corporate investors and shareholders, but it underscores why people should no longer look to Silicon Valley as a primary source of innovation.
The promise of the Web3
Most members of the crypto community know this. That’s why we’re building Web3: the decentralized evolution of the internet built on blockchain. This next phase of the Internet will be about turning users into owners, anathema to Silicon Valley’s ethos of growing and centralizing power at all costs.
What problem does Web3 solve?
Web3 will eliminate the need for intermediaries and allow anyone to acquire ownership of a company through the purchase of tokens, granting them decision-making power over that company’s future. Think of it as a combination of crowdfunding and stock holding, but without an almighty CEO and board of directors pulling all the strings.
The surge of interest in recent months alone shows that traditional consumers would appreciate Web3’s principles of decentralization. Over the past decade, the American public has steadily lost faith in the ability of big tech companies to work in the public interest, and most think tech companies have too much power.
What Blockchain Technology Unlocks
So what will businesses look like with this new model? Tech companies will no longer be tied to a specific position or investors, but to the intelligent use of blockchain technology.
We have already seen it in action. After becoming frustrated with the World of Warcraft video game, Vitalik Buterin saw the dangers of centralization and began researching Bitcoin. He went on to create Ethereum, an alternative blockchain with a market capitalization that reached nearly half a trillion dollars. Although Buterin founded Ethereum, his community has decided its direction (evidenced by the multiple forks of the blockchain). Surprisingly, this was only in 2014, at the start of the crypto revolution, and the space has since grown larger and more advanced.
If a frustrated teen can continue building a $ 500 billion worth of network, imagine what can be achieved when cryptographic concepts are in the hands of multiple people. Silicon Valley should be terrified.
A new growth vector for professionals and VCs
It should come as no surprise that many former managers and tech executives have launched into crypto projects. For example, Sandy Carter, former vice president of Amazon Web Services and general manager of IBM, joined Unstoppable Domains, an NFT domain name provider, as senior vice president of business development. And Cecile Duparc, former director of communications at Disney and Netflix, is now global head of public relations and social media at Bitstamp, a cryptocurrency exchange. Just a week ago, former Global Head of Gaming Ryan Watt left YouTube for Polygon, a provider of Ethereum scaling solutions for Web3 developers.
Last year we already saw huge investments in cryptocurrency startups. At the end of November, more than $ 27 billion was invested in crypto startups globally, more than the previous 10 years combined, according to PitchBook data cited by the New York Times. The document points out that “many of the investments have been made by the venture capital branches of cryptographic companies, activities whose continued growth will depend on the expansion of the ecosystem”.
Venture investors, the main capital holders in Silicon Valley, have an interest in extracting as much value as possible from as many people as possible, all to be kept by as few people as possible. They love IP. But this slows down innovation and competition, which ends up hurting us all.
VCs drive innovation based on their own self-interest, not interest in what helps most people. This is why most seem to stay away from crypto projects at the moment, but we can be sure they are trying to find ways to extract value from it. Once they jump in, we should be careful.
Take away
Of course, there will always be people looking to build the next Google or Apple for VCs to pour their money into, but with the innovations coming with Web3, it’s clear that time has passed for those startups.
We’ll soon be judging innovation by how much it empowers users, not how much profit a company generates for its investors on Wall Street. And that means the end of Silicon Valley as we know it.
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Sources 2/ https://builtin.com/blockchain/web3-time-is-now The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
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