Recently, a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), a famous VC firm, has made frequent moves. The company led a $13 million investment in Nym Technology, a Web 3.0 infrastructure start-up focusing on blockchain privacy. Subsequently, there was another $3.1 million a16z-led investment in Mem Protocol, also a Web 3.0-centered start-up, on November 18. What is the reason behind a16z’s frequent Web 3.0 investments in the past month?
An obvious reason is its insane popularity. Aiming to build the new decentralized photo network for Web 3.0, Numbers Protocol has recently received a $6 million funding led by well-known institutional investors such as Protocol Labs and DAO Maker. During an online roundtable forum at the end of last month, Haipo Yang, head of a rising star in the VC sector, suggested that ViaBTC Capital would focus on investments in Web 3.0 infrastructures. It is clear that the Web 3.0 segment has become a vital square on the board.
What is Web 3.0?
During the nearly three decades since the birth of the World Wide Web, cyberspace has been fast-growing. When the British scientist Tim Berners Lee created the World Wide Web, he envisaged an open world of information, a universal space free from the control of any authority and accessible to anyone at any time. Some academics share the view that Web 3.0 is a return to the inventor’s original vision for the Internet.
From Web 1.0 to Web 3.0, the Internet has continued to progress. In the Web 2.0 era we live in, although there are varying views on the final shape of the Web 3.0 future, there is a technical agreement that cloud computing, decentralized data networks, blockchain, and artificial intelligence are the keys to the development of Web 3.0.
Web 3.0 developments
No one knows for sure when Web 3.0 will mature, but there are online communities, such as the Web3 Foundation, Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polkadot, that are working on different infrastructure projects to turn Web 3.0 into reality.
Privacy-preserving infrastructures
1. Nym Technology: By activating a privacy-preserving blockchain, Nym will open a new design space where developers could create previously impossible privacy Web 3.0 applications. As a new generation of globalized privacy infrastructure, Nym aims to expand its network scale and become the privacy hub of the whole Internet. It also intends to make the network more efficient by rewarding validators powering the network.
2. Secret Network: As the first privacy-focused smart contract blockchain built using Cosmos, Secret Network plays a major role in the Cosmos ecosystem. Additionally, applications built on Secret can utilize encrypted data without revealing it to anyone, even the nodes in the network.
Social network infrastructures
1. Sapien Network: Sapien, a unique example of Web 3.0, is a highly customizable, democratized social news platform capable of rewarding millions of content creators and curators without any centralized intermediaries.
2. Socialcontact Dman: As a high-performance NFT social platform based on the metaverse Web 3.0, this new social network combines social media, NFT marketplace, scalable blockchain, and its native token DM, allowing creators to generate content and mint their own NFTs while sharing them with fans.
Storage-centered infrastructures
1. Filecoin: On this crypto-driven storage network, miners earn FIL by providing open disk space, while users spend FIL to encrypt and store files in a decentralized way.
2. Storj: It is the first decentralized, end-to-end encrypted cloud storage that uses blockchain technology and cryptography to secure online files. At its technical core, Storj uses blockchain to achieve decentralized, end-to-end cloud storage. Instead of data centers or computer rooms, it uses the spare disk space of our PCs.
Game infrastructures
1. Axie Infinity: Built on the Ethereum blockchain, Axie is a digital pet world inspired by Pokémon. Anyone can get token rewards through proficient gameplay and contribution to the ecosystem.
2. The Sandbox: Like Axie Infinity, this is also a Play to Earn game. The unique feature of The Sandbox is that players get to build a virtual world where they can design, share, and sell in-world assets.
These outstanding projects have laid a solid foundation for the development of Web 3.0. This, coupled with sufficient funding support, has created an enabling environment for Web 3.0, and there is reason to believe that we may usher in the real Web 3.0 era in the near future.