Web 3.0 needs more users, not more investors

cointelegraph.com:

The wide world of crypto has always been made up of people who know a lot about money. After all, cryptocurrencies themselves are financial products.

The paradigm-shifting elevator pitch of Web 3.0 has always been able to pique the interest of investors, and over the last couple of years, we’ve seen an extraordinary amount of money flowing freely into the industry. Those funds have come both in the form of direct investment  —  venture capital (VC) and now decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)  and indirect investment — institutional acquisition of cryptocurrencies driving token prices up and bolstering the crypto-based treasuries of Web 3.0 projects. 

We can expect to see more and more resources piling into the Web 3.0 space as time goes on, but it is becoming increasingly true that it does not have a (monetary) resource shortage. What it does have, is a shortage of products which are usable, appropriate and attractive for a mainstream audience.

So far, Web 3.0 and cryptocurrencies are mostly used by the classic early-adopter demographics — younger people and people with high technical proficiency. That can be expected for any technology which is extremely disruptive. In the past, the same thing has been true of social media (Web 2.0) and even computers. When Meta (former Facebook) first started, only college-aged students were invited to use the platform. When the “web” first drew breath, a list of known websites had to be maintained just so people would be able to use it. 

At the moment, most of us are still living and working in a world where the ability to exchange and trade cryptocurrency tokens for fiat value is an essential part of their function. That paradigm may well shift in the future, but for now, most