Indeed, transparency of ownership has also solved a problem that has existed in the gaming world for years. As Alex Connolly, co-founder and CTO at Immutable elaborated, “Last year, players spent more than 100 billion dollars buying timor-leste telemarketing database items inside video games… the trouble is that players actually own none of those assets. If you want to sell the assets you acquire in a game, you’re going to struggle.”
NFTs mean that the assets users buy inside video games can be now be represented as blockchain tokens, which can be bought and sold in an international marketplace. As Connolly pointed out, NFTs have managed to get everyone to agree on a global standard for digital property and that’s actually a huge step forward.
For Moore, this touches on two more key benefits of Web3
“You can use Web3 technology to either make [existing business models] more efficient or disrupt [them] in some way,” he said. “But I think the other interesting thing is where you look at what you can do with this technology that’s different from before and do things that weren’t possible otherwise.”
A hybrid approach often works best
Myers emphasised that any startup contemplating using Web3 needs to ask themselves two important questions:
Does your solution need to be a Web3 solution?
“If your solution can be built in a traditional way… you’ll save yourself a lot of effort by not needing to build a Web3 application,” he said.
2. What parts need to be built on-chain and what parts can be built in a traditional way?
“One of the most common myths… is that if you’re building a Web3 application or service or system, that everything needs to be decentralised, that you’d have to go all in on-chain,” Myers explained. “But you can just deploy the key features of your product that need to live on-chain on a blockchain, and you keep the rest built in a traditional way.”
Splitting out your service or system in this way will ultimately save you time and money and get you into market quicker.
To circle back to the NFT example, in an NFT marketplace, minting the NFTs themselves and the trading mechanism both obviously have to live on chain. However, auxiliary services like user management, data and analytics or the actual generation of the art, don’t need to be built in a purely Web3 way.