Five Paradigm Shifts From Web2 to Web3
First things first: Web1 vs Web2 vs Web3
The paradigms
Web1 is referred as the beginning of the internet. It saw the birth of Encarta, Altavista, MSN and even Yahoo.
Web2 is the digital era, where the ecosystem is currently shaped by the Big Four, Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, and other big players such as Microsoft, Salesforce, Alibaba and Samsung.
Web3 is the shift from digital to virtual, from centralized to decentralized, from consumers to consumers-contributors. Ecosystem is driven and at-present defined by groups like Binance, Crypto.com, Coinbase, Ripple, Polkadot, Decentraland, Brave, The Sandbox, OpenSea, Rarible, Sorare, Audius and others that keep emerging every day.
To keep it simple, I like to use the following explanations for the three web generations:
- Web1: They create content for you. You explore information.
- Web2: You create content for their algorithms. You are the product.
- Web3: You create content for everyone. You are a creator.
Deep dive into 5 shifts between web2 and web3
1. Biggest shift: Interoperability
We hear it all the time. One of the biggest game changer with web3/blockchain is interoperability between different worlds, realms and platforms.
Imagine being able to use your Spotify playlist in iTunes, or transfer your Amazon Wishlist to target.com or Ebay. Well that’s not organically feasible between web2 platforms, but this concept is at the core of web3.
For example, you can use a single wallet to store currency and perform transactions across different web3 environments. You can also transport your NFT assets from a platform to another.
That being said, despite its huge potential I find web3 interoperability not user-friendly enough, but on paper it looks extremely promising.
2. Events & ticketing management
Ticketing is one of the most valuable and common use cases for crypto and NFTs. Here it’s kind of a no-brainer: web3 brings more transparency on selling and 2nd hand ownership of tickets for concerts and sports. This can put things in order in the grey markets where it tends to get chaotic. Reselling unauthorized NFT tickets is almost impossible, and artists/stakeholders can program the NFT tickets secondary sale price or even put a limit to the number of resale (0 meaning ticket is not resalable).
A recent example of how the 2022 UEFA Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid turned to be a nightmare for tickets holders because — partially — of the fact that an important amount of fake tickets were held by people who wanted to enter the stadium. That would not have been an issue with Web3. Blockchain will allow full traceability, transparency and authenticity for the real ticket holders, and disallow the copy or production of fake tickets.
For that, you’ll need an end-to-end blockchain-based solution that traces the different steps of the funnel: from the initial purchase until the scanning at the entrance of the stadium. To make it simple, here is a possible flow for NFT-based ticketing:
1- Fan purchase the NFT ticket. Ticket is transferred to the fan’s wallet.
2- Fan goes to the venue. Ticket is scanned. Real-time verification is made: Ticket Uniqueness?
Ticket status (activated or new)?
Match between Holder wallet id <-> Ticket id?
3- Once scanned, ticket status changes to activated.
4- At this stage, the venue can activate more engagement with fans such as providing discount on food/beverage, unlocking premium seats, offering VIP backstage tour, etc.
3. Loyalty programs
Many NFT-Based B2C loyalty use cases popped-out throughout 2021–2022 (Clinique, Dolce & Gabbana, etc.). After these first waves of NFT-Based Loyalty, the same question was going around: do we really need NFT-based solutions to launch loyalty programs and increase brands customers lifetime value? Why aren’t web2 platforms such as Merkle Loyalty, Talon.One (www.talon.one) or Cheetah Digital enough? What’s in it for brands and what’s in it for customers?
Most of brands saw an opportunity to surf on the NFT wave in order to attract new customers from late millennials to Gen Z. These customers represent a big chunk of the crypto-active users (31% of US adults age 18-29 are crypto investors), or even to reactivate sleeping customers. That’s the opportunistic side of the trend.
On the other hand, it was proven that one single customer feeling was still at the core of brand’s engagement: the feeling of uniqueness. And here is where NFTs bring key value proposition for both brands and customers. Things shifted from “Shop -> Earn -> Redeem” in conventional loyalty programs to “Shop -> Earn -> Redeem Uniqueness” using NFT on web3-based loyalty platforms. Because of NFTs, as a loyal customer, you can receive unique perks that are traceable and non-replaceable since every NFT contains a digital signature that makes each one unique.
That being said, let’s get back to the initial question. What’s in it for brands and what’s in it for customers? Here is a table that guides on when to launch loyalty programs with web2 or web3 solutions.
4. CRM Customer Relationship Management
In web2 CRM world, things are pretty straightforward. You engage with customers and try to establish and personalize your 1:1 relationship with them. A customer has mainly 2 different identifiers: email and/or phone number. To communicate with your customers, you leverage emails triggers, social touchpoints or sms.
Here’s where it becomes messy in web3: we need new ways of engaging and identifying customers on-chain while all our legacy channels and CRM platforms are designed to engage with off-chain known customers using emails or phone numbers.
First thing to acknowledge is that, as a brand, you should not try to create a relationship with customers but rather genuianly integrate a community. You then need to capture on-chain data to onboard members to your community with embeddable web3 forms (Connect to wallet). At this stage, you are able to merge off-chain data (emails, home address, age, etc.) with on-chain data (transactions, wallet public address/unique identifier, etc.). Last but not least, you can send segmented notifications to your community via conventional web2 channels like emails and vDiscord or trigger on-chain interactions such as wallet-to-wallet communication or airdrops (giving away free tokens as part of a promotional initiative).
5. Partnership Ecosystem (#DX Developer Experience)
When you search for web3 developers or agencies, most of the time you stumble upon developers that mainly implement smart contracts. Smart contracts represent 10–15% of the dev work estimated in web3 projects, which means that it’s not simple to find resources/agencies for the other 85% of the dev work needed in web3 projects.
It is also kind of unclear on what would be the best web3 Developer experience, partnership program, or even developers conferences such as web3con. While in web2, and because of its maturity, there are top programs out there:
- Partners programs and communities: Shopify Devs, Meta for developers, Twitter for developers, Salesforce Trailblazers, etc.
- Conferences: Twilio Signal, Salesforce Dreamforce, F8 Refresh and others
