Web3 is growing while prices fall: crypto versus Web3 and DeFi versus CeFi

Transcript

GM GM Welcome Friends back to another episode of web3 Academy a place where we are guiding entrepreneurs creators and businesses into web3 I'm Kyle reidhead you can find me on Twitter at Kyle reedhead and I hope you will follow me there and hit me up I'd love to chat with others in the web through space especially those who are listening to this podcast in this episode today we are talking about how web3 is eating the world and no one knows it really the title of this episode was supposed to be crypto is dead but web3 is thriving we already used that one uh in an earlier episode so we had to switch this but basically the point in this episode is it really it came from

um after everything happened with FTX and everything going on in the crypto space right now I sat down one night and just started writing and I wrote my thoughts on just this industry as a whole and where it's gone from you know it's it it's early days from when it started when it was all about cryptocurrency to nowadays where it's more about web3 and the tech and a lot of people don't understand the difference between the two and even understand that there is a big difference and so um I just wanted to to dive into a bit of a journey of where this industry has gone and separate a few things so that you can understand the difference between all the bad that's going on in this space right now and then all the good that's actually happening that most

people aren't realizing and I know we're in this crazy Grim dark place in the middle of a bear market and it seems like it's so bad and there's a lot of people that might not be sticking around this industry but I think at the end of this you'll start to understand that hey there's actually a bunch of different things going on in this space and there is so much good and most people just don't really understand it yet so we're going to dive into that before I do a couple asks from you one a no-cost thing for you that can really help us so much at the Academy if you like our content if you support our content then please follow or subscribe on YouTube Apple podcast Spotify wherever you're listening to uh just give a subscribe

that's all we need if you want to do a review and a star that's great too but really it's just about the Subscribe and follow that helps us grow it helps get this content out to others so I appreciate you and so grateful for you for doing that for us uh and let's get into the episode so we don't waste any more of your time before we do let's just take a quick second to hear from our sponsors the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new

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about web 3 is eating the world and no one knows it so let's do a quick reality check crypto seems to be burning to the ground company after company is falling into bankruptcy and the contagion is spreading like wildfire furthermore our favorite magic internet monies continue to go in One Direction down quite the contrast of 2020 in 2021 isn't it back then crypto companies were raising Millions with ease the charts were always green and we were all on our way to becoming rich what a time it was to be alive now well we're all broke and holding bags of coins that used to be worth 100x more than they were today and don't even ask about the stupid jpegs in our

wallets we once paid thousands of dollars for we can't even give them away because either the tech doesn't work or they're stuck in exchange that no longer exists you can't help but think is it all over were the naysayers right all along you know they were always saying crypto is a scam crypto has no value crypto is just a Ponzi scheme well my answer to that is crypto might be dead but web3 is thriving you know web3 is the new sheriff in town and it doesn't give two shits about FTX Celsius or three hours Capital Webster isn't phased by greedy billionaires and finance douchebags over leveraging and losing billions you know what web3 has to say about that just keep building the best part about it is that weather

is eating the world and no one even knows it in the middle of an absolute crypto shitstorm Nike one of the biggest brands in the world launched dot swoosh it's a platform to build virtual Creations AKA web3 powered Marketplace to buy and sell user generated nfts using crypto graphic wallets and identity built on crypto graphic blockchain Starbucks launch a new app for their loyalty program using stamps is what they call it AKA a web 3 powered Marketplace to earn buy and sell Starbucks nfts built on top of a crypto graphic blockchain Instagram is allowing users to monetize their content by selling their posts as

digital Collectibles right inside of their app AKA a web 2 front end that automatically mints nfts on a crypto graphic blockchain Reddit launched almost 3 million customized avatars that are stored in a user's vault in other words they onboarded three million people in nfts the disguised as jpegs stored on a cryptographic blockchain in a cryptographic wallet do you see where I'm going with this web3 has literally never been better than it is today even though the world around it is burning down but this is the point that most people are missing cryptocurrency in web 3 are very different things yes they are both functions of blockchain technology and

both use cryptography but in reality they aspire to achieve very different goals so let's take a quick dive into crypto versus web 3 so we can wrap our heads around what the heck is going on in this crazy digital world crypto versus web3 when most people use the word crypto they're referring to a shortened version of the word cryptocurrency which was the first invention built on top of a blockchain Bitcoin or the king of crypto was the first of these new currencies that uses cryptography as its monetary policy rather than a central bank it's an incredible invention that started the blockchain revolution that we're in today cryptocurrencies or you could think of them as let's say crypto money are

financial instruments that aim to separate money from the state the idea of crypto money is to create sound money money that can't be inflated Away by central banks and money that isn't owned or controlled by any one country or government the big idea here is if we fix money we fix the world right if governments no longer control their local currency they'll have to start behaving it puts the power back into the hands of the people as governments can no longer print their way out of problems like they do today it brings Financial equality and opportunity across the world now since Bitcoin many cryptocurrencies have launched attempting to become the next big crypto money some have faster transaction speeds and some have cheaper fees While others quite frankly are just

idiotic meme currencies regardless up until just about a few years ago that was all the crypto industry had to offer these speculative internet native currencies which promised to change the world so when most people refer to crypto as being a scam upon this scheme or saying it has no value this is what they're referring to and for the most part they're actually correct most of these currencies from the early days went to zero some of them still are not at zero I don't understand why I mean I do understand why but it's ridiculous right the problem is those all these people that are calling crypto uh a scam or a Ponzi scheme or saying has no value they miss the force for the trees they missed the true unlock of blockchain Technology

and before I go any further let's be clear sound internet money built on a censorship resistant blockchain is one of the greatest inventions of all time right so I'm not I'm not knocking the crypto money side of things I think that is extremely important and we need that for what we're trying to build here in web 3 and crypto now I won't go into any more detail on which sound money I think is the best as that is not the point of this article ultrasound money uh oops sorry the cold winters of Canada here are getting to me but let's move on right so we built sound money now there's a bunch of scams there's a bunch of Ponzi schemes there's a bunch of extra tokens that make this industry and make sound money look terrible and look stupid right that's where we get this

sort of like reputation from and that all came in the 2016-2017-2018 era then we move on to D5 right we built D5 decentralized Finance now I'm going to keep this part short as it's only important to clarify what just happened in this industry but the idea of D5 was this if we're going to have internet native money that uses cryptography as a monetary policy rather than central banks we should also create Financial Services which use cryptography to facilitate those Services rather than traditional Banks so the goal was to remove trusted third parties and custodians at all levels of the money tree and so we did just that and by we I mean the thousands of extremely smart

blockchain developers around the world who are way smarter than me I just write and talk about this stuff uniswap Ave maker down many other incredible D5 applications were built on top of blockchains they facilitate lending borrowing and various other Financial Services in a permissionless and trustless manner to anyone in the world with access to Internet another incredible invention enabled through blockchain technology but wait lending borrowing crypto isn't this the thing that made all these crypto companies go bankrupt isn't this the reason why my life savings my 401k and the money from refinancing my mortgage just went to zero I'm just kidding don't do that but this is the part of the story where people tend to get a bit confused the

answer is no D5 is actually thriving right now these applications are working exactly as planned and have had zero bankruptcies or bailouts during the recent bear Market where things went wrong was in sifi centralized Finance you know a group of Finance boroughs didn't quite get the memo on what crypto and D5 were all about decided to take retail investors crypto and start lending borrowing and leveraging it the traditional way the way where we have to trust institutions and humans to do the right thing instead of trusting cryptographic protocols to do the only thing that it's programmed to do which is not fail unfortunately most people don't understand the difference between defy

and C5 or more likely just don't actually care and they're just willing to hand their crypto to these greedy douchebags to play around with trusting humans and institutions with our money AKA power is always the problem my friends and that is why our industry is in the mess it is today the FDX implosion another catastrophic event that is making most people in the world believe that crypto is once again dead again it's regarding financial instruments in this idea that crypto equals money but cryptography and blockchain don't equal money what cryptography and blockchain really enable is trustless and permissionless digital ownership now money is one product of that but

there are so many more and that brings us to the party happening right now in web 3. so before I get into web three we remember that crypto is talking about in crypto I put in quotations because that's just the word that people use because it's short form for cryptocurrencies you could call web3 crypto because it's all using cryptography but now we're just getting into semantics with words but understand that the it's crypto cryptocurrencies that are currently getting us into this mess and not even that it's people using cryptocurrencies to do centralized things which is actually the whole problem of money in the first place right with traditional Banks so if crypto equals crypto money right

cryptographic money then web3 equals crypto Tech or cryptographic technology so while crypto is focused on fixing money and separating it from the state web 3 is focused on fixing our Internet rights and separating our data from Big tech companies on the internet data equals power it's another form of value just like an internet commodity just like money now big tech companies own and control our data and that's own and control the power the more we use the internet the more power these companies gain I'm not even sure that most people realize the size of this problem currently big Tech in some instances owns more power than many nation states themselves

think about it Facebook the largest tech platform online hosts almost three billion users meta its parent company owns four apps that each have more than one billion users on it whereas the largest country by population in the world China hosts 1.4 billion people now we're comparing apples to oranges here you know but the more we live work communicate and do just about everything on these platforms the bigger our problems uh become China can't track all the data on those 1.4 billion people everything they do Facebook can meta can right but this is where web3 comes to the rescue we can use blockchain technology to provide trustless and permissionless ownership over our data

just like we can with our money not only does this put the power back in the hands of the users but it also improves how we use the internet it creates new ways of online monetization and opens up a Pandora's box of Internet native businesses and communities now if you're not completely familiar with what web3 is one you can go to my Twitter and check out the pinned tweet there on what is web3 or there's a podcast episode which you can just search in and it's called web3 unlocks new business models you can check that out there and that'll help you get caught up to speed on web3 but how is web 3 weathering the storm easy web 3 is about technology not speculation it's about creating a better

experience for users which includes giving them ownership and sharing value and power with them too and most importantly it's working the biggest brands in the world have all bought in Nike Adidas Budweiser Visa FIFA the NFL the NBA the list goes on they see the value that web3 technology brings to their audiences and they want to be a part of it even better the biggest tech companies in the world have bought into they understand that web3 is the future in that their businesses have the most to lose from avoiding adoption rather than reacting as the music industry did with let's say Napster and downloadable music tech companies today are smarter and are instead embracing technological disruption

Google is helping developers and businesses with web3 tech stack meta is helping creators turn their content into cell phone content via nfts Reddit is onboarding millions into accessing web through wallets and Twitter well who the hell knows what Elon is doing over there but it looks like they're making moves into web3 as well the point is everyone's on board with web3 blockchain technology is accelerating and exponential rate the human and intellectual Capital entering the space just continues to grow and companies Brands celebrities and more across every industry possible just continue to experiment and utilize this technology even during the darkest moments of this crypto bear Market the web 3 party hasn't stopped interest rates the money

printer and greedy Finance boroughs don't impact this party the GMS are still flowing on Twitter the builders are still building and the party continues and so I say it again crypto may be dead but Webster is thriving and honestly web3 is just getting started so that was the article that I decided to write last week and really just breaks down what's really going on in this industry and so I hope that we can all separate this sort of like crypto defy C5 Mayhem that's happening right now and understand that what's really going on here is actually incredible and it's working and while the money side of crypto looks a bit grim and that's okay the tech side of crypto I.E web3 is just growing so fast there are so many

companies so many businesses that are all building on what in web 3 and it's pretty amazing to see how fast this Tech is growing and so if we look a year from now two years from now who knows what's going on with these prices of crypto but it's kind of irrelevant because if you're building into space if you're taking notice in the space if you're using the stuff in the space then you are learning one of the fastest growing Technologies this world has ever seen and so let's keep partying let's keep enjoying what's going on in web3 because this party is not stopping we don't care what's going on in the crypto world because web3 is fired up well friends thank you thank you so much for listening I hope this was useful I hope this was helpful to you to kind of

understand this industry and where things are going hopefully it also gives you a more optimistic look on the space with everything happening right now um this is not the time to leave crypto this is not the time to leave web3 this is the time to be building to be learning to be creating because the opportunity is right now in this space and those who stick around right now are going to see the greatest Returns the greatest opportunities when everything turns around in terms of markets interest rates and all that kind of stuff friends thank you so much again for listening and please subscribe follow on Spotify Apple podcast YouTube wherever it is and if you're on YouTube listening throw a comment below let me know what

you think of this uh or join our Discord and jump in there and have a chat with us because we are always hanging out in the web 3 Academy Discord friends thank you and have a wonderful wonderful week thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web free journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 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 and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you

friends and see you in the next one