Web3, NFTs, Metaverse: The tools for a truly decentralized future

Published at: May 21, 2022

Attendees to the BlockDown Croatia 2022 festival were witness to Cointelegraph’s discussions around sociopolitics of the Web3 ecosystem, nonfungible tokens (NFT) and the Metaverse. It turns out that ongoing innovations across the crypto ecosystem are well-positioned to dictate the future of media and entertainment.

While crypto continues to blur the lines between the virtual and physical worlds, Cointelegraph’s editor-in-chief, Kristina Cornèr, agreed that “It’s been a crazy year” when talking about the rising impact of crypto innovations within media companies during the BlockDown festival.

Cornèr highlighted use cases within the NFT space that gives independent artists and journalists a platform to raise funds and counter real-world challenges such as climate change. In a separate discussion with Dylan Dewdney, the founder of NFT3, a unified identity network, Cornèr raised questions related to the merging of virtual and physical worlds in the Metaverse.

According to Dewdney, real-world problems have a good chance of seeping into the Metaverse despite the merger of the two worlds. However, he suggested developing a pseudonymous system wherein users are verified but can choose not to disclose their identities to other members of the Metaverse.

As the world slowly shifts into its new home, the Metaverse, Dewdney believes that “the real world will become better.” However, it will require the people to inculcate some of the ethos of crypto, especially in relation to equitability and personal responsibility:

“I think its time for the world to evolve and we are starting to lay the technical foundations for a lot of that. You have to be careful about how this plays out and really take individual responsibility about spreading that message.”

Showcasing an in-house attempt to create the biggest truly community-owned Web3 festival, Cornèr, too, revealed the relaunch of BlockShow — Cointelegraph’s flagship event — as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that allows attendees to own a stake in the show and participate in organizing events. According to BlockShow CEO Addy Crezee, the goal at BlockShow DAO is “to bring more people to Web3 and help people feel the benefits of the ownership economy.”

Getting further into discussing the sociopolitics involved with living in the Metaverse, Dewdney told Cornèr:

“We’re still going to have all the same problems because we’re still the same old boring humans who do the same old petty things, and also great things.”

If the crypto community can successfully decentralize the internet, “it’s a future really worth getting excited about,” at an individual as well as other social levels.

With NFT3, Dewdney aims to provide a decentralized identity service for the Metaverse ecosystem. The service can associate various information with a pseudonymous but real-life identity. On an end note, Dewdney believed that the crypto ecosystem needs to evolve beyond the financial use case into the “human use case” of blockchain.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) recently launched a $600 million Games Fund One dedicated to gaming startups with a focus on Web3. The fund aims to support game studios, consumer applications and gaming infrastructure providers.

As Cointelegraph previously reported, Metaverse projects are also attracting investments from gaming industry titans. In April, Epic Games, creator of the popular Fortnite title, raised $2 billion to create a metaverse with funding from Sony and Lego.