The internet has been on a journey. In the first version of the internet, now known as Web 1.0, there were few creators, and speeds were slow. As such, the capabilities of the web were a bit limited. The second version of the internet led to more changes and capabilities. Think of platforms like Google, Twitter, and Dropbox. In this article, we will look at the concept of web 3.0 and identify some of the top cryptocurrencies in the industry.
What is Web 3.0?
Web 3.0 is the next iteration of the internet. In the first two versions, the internet was mostly centralized, which led to significant power being in the hands of a small number of people. For example, today, an outage of a product like Amazon’s AWS leads to the disruption of popular platforms like Uber, Twitch, and Facebook.
Centralized internet has also led to censorship. For example, in 2021, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter decided to ban the president of the United States. Millions of accounts have been banned from social media.
Web 3.0 aims to change this using blockchain and open-source computing. The idea is that instead of using centralized products, people can use decentralized ones that work equally well. Also, instead of enriching a few investors, people can make money by using these platforms. So, here are some of the top web 3.0 crypto projects and their tokens.
Brave
Browsers act as the gateway to the internet. As a result, they are used by billions of people every day on their desktops, smartphones, and tablets.
Google Chrome has the biggest market share in the industry. According to Statista, it is used by approximately 3.2 billion people globally. Other top players in the sector are Opera, Microsoft, Vivaldi, and Mozilla.
These platforms have various revenue models. For example, Opera makes money through ads that appear on its homepage. Google and Microsoft offer their browsers for free so that they can capture people in their ecosystems. Their browser revenue is usually negligible compared to their other products.
However, the browser model is broken, and this is where Brave comes in. For one, Chrome and Edge are known for taking users’ data and then using it to deliver them adverts.
Brave solves the challenge in a number of ways. For example, it comes with an in-built ad-blocker, which gives users a smooth surfing experience. It also has internal ads, which users can opt-in and make money. Also, people can decide to contribute to their favorite creators.
Brave is a web 3.0 project whose cryptocurrency is known as Basic Attention Token or BAT. the chart below shows how it has performed in the past year.
Audius
Audius is a web 3.0 project that is changing the music industry. While the industry generates billions of dollars per year, musicians take home a small part of these funds. Also, the sector is highly concentrated, with centralized labels and streaming companies having a big market share.
Audius aims to solve this challenge using blockchain technology. It has created a mobile app and web platform that allows musicians to upload their songs and then make money as people listen to their music. Through its partnership with TikTok, musicians are also making income whenever people use their songs.
Audius has a cryptocurrency known as AUDIO. According to CoinGecko, Audius is the 131st biggest cryptocurrency in the world, with a market capitalization of over $634 million.
Livepeer
Video streaming is another industry that is highly centralized. Today, some of the biggest companies in the sector are Wistia, YouTube, and Vimeo. These firms provide a platform for streaming content.
However, while their products work well, they are expensive to most users because they handle their transcoding. Estimates are that live streamers spend about $3 per hour to upload it to Amazon or Google Cloud.
Livepeer is one of the web 3.0 projects that are seeking to disrupt this industry using blockchain. Its platform uses a peer-to-peer infrastructure platform to simplify the process. The two parts of the process are known as delegators and orchestrators.
The latter are people who share their free bandwidth to the network, while the former is the token holders who stake their coins. Orchestrators make money in the form of the LPT token whenever people use their network.
LPT has a total market capitalization of over $700 million and is the 127th biggest cryptocurrency in the world.
Chainlink
Chainlink is different from the three web 3.0 projects that we have mentioned above. It is not a web 3.0 project in a traditional sense because many regular people don’t use it directly. Instead, it plays a pivotal role in the industry by providing smart oracles that connect off-chain data to the blockchain.
A good example of this is sports betting. To develop a decentralized betting application, developers need data about games. This information is provided by a company that manually or automatically collects it. Therefore, with Chainlink, a developer can incorporate this data while ensuring trust,
Another example is that a developer can use Chainlink to add stocks or commodities data. Today, the platform is used by most developers, such as those building DEFI and NFT projects.
Other important “infrastructure” web 3.0 projects are Polygon, The Graph, and Ethereum.
BitTorrent
BitTorrent is also a web 3.0 project. The software, which was acquired by Justin Sun in 2018 for $180 million, enables people to download content on the internet.
The platform works by connecting computers from around the world, enabling them to share data. As a result, a person in the UK can download content that is stored in hundreds of countries. It is mostly used by people who are downloading pirated content.
BitTorrent is so popular that it has over 2 billion users from around the world. Other services it offers are DLive and DLive Protocol. BTTC is the native cryptocurrency for the ecosystem and has over $2 billion in market cap.
The chart above shows the pricing of the BTTC token. The timeline is short because the new version of the coin was launched in February 2022.
Summary
Web 3.0 is a controversial scene. Some people believe that it is the future of the internet, while others think that it is a fad. What is clear, though, is that the industry is changing how people use the web. In this article, we have identified some of the few web 3.0 projects and their cryptocurrencies.