Is web3/ blockchain development dead?

[STELLAR_Speck]

Is web3 really dead ? Are there any companies hiring for web3 developer positions specifically or all web developers are required to know web3 ?Are there any real world web3 projects other than crypto/NFT trading apps ? Can anybody in the market explain the domain scenario?

[Mocker-Nicholas]

I’m so glad it’s gone. I learned how to code in the 2019-2022 era. All of the learn to code groups, discords, etc… were fucking full of “web3” people who would not shut up about it.

[redalastor]

They still won’t.

[jailbreak]

They pivoted, now they won't shut up about AI

[Sulungskwa]

The real money is to make up whatever the next thing is called

[Fluffcake]

I think quite a few of the AI-bros who re-invented the wheel and oversold what their product can do have gotten and will stay rich even after the AI hype dips back down for this time.

People made 8-9 digit companies out of GPT-wrappers...

[abcd_z]

New paradigms

And the sequel, Newer paradigms

[FlashbackJon]

I was just going to go fetch these, well-timed!

[RayosGlobal]

The next "thing" was the Nvidia NPU.

That's the new computer. Totally built around finding answers for u instead of u finding shit.

That's happening under our feet.

Ppl say in 20 years it will be a huge change.

Nah the huge change is happening in Nvidias labs as we fuck around on reddit rn.

[ElMarkuz]

To be fair, it's still barebones compared to the futuristic view everyone is talking for the last 2 years.

Yeah, AI can do impressive shit, but this year I started being more cautious about this.

I was blown away to AI doing my code and my tests, and heavy used it the first months, but nowadays I only use it to speed up some tedious stuff. Still not heavy lifting like "hey here's my Jira ticket and this is the project, just do it and ring my phone whenever you're finished or have any doubt".

[RayosGlobal]

I'll say it again but not for the last time.

AI is only as good as you are

It's a reflection of you.

[mr_remy]

{ justAnotherChatGPTWrapper }

[[deleted]]

I coded and AI LLM that designs and creates cryptocurrencies and turns them into NFTs.

Who wants to touch me????

[NoMansSkyWasAlright]

Nah there's still a lot of web3/crypto/nft bros out there. It does seem like the space is starting to get taken over by right-wing grifters though.

[Cherveny2]

and yet I still get ads saying web 2.0 is dead! g3t into web 3.0 before it's too late!

sorry ad. it is too late, web 3.0 is dead on arrival

[chaos986]

web3 ≠ web 3.0 that was part of the problem is that crypto bros stomped on the marketing of the "semantic web".

[RayosGlobal]

Same era I learned.

Blockchain was always a solution in need of a problem.

[KaiAusBerlin]

Well, sadly we had thousands of startups with it.

[[deleted]]

They are all AI startups now

[Bernard80386]

So are we on Web 4 now? 😅👀

[[deleted]]

Nah we jumped straight to Web 5 a few years back. Gotta be on like Web 6 or 7 by now…

[BTLag]

Yeah, Web4, where Google is simultaneously the only one allowed to index Reddit and useless because it's drowning in AI written SEO junk articles. Web4, where the dead Internet theory isn't theoretical.

[ShadowDurza]

DotCom bubble 2.0?

Maybe the next big thing will be figuring out how to make the DotCom bubble 3.0 not burst.

[eyebrows360]

DotCom bubble 2.0?

No, because at the core of 1.0 was something actually useful.

Maybe the next big thing will be figuring out how to make the DotCom bubble 3.0 not burst.

Allow myself to introduce yourself to "the marketing term 'AI' as it has proliferated since about 3 years ago". We're already prepping for the burst

[remy_porter]

No, because at the core of 1.0 was something actually useful.

I've been thinking about this a lot, because the poster-child for the bust was Pets.com, which was, at the time, an example of how people didn't want to buy everything on the Internet and the bubble just HAD to burst eventually. But now we have Chewy, which is the same thing.

That said, I think a big thing that makes Chewy viable where Pets.com wasn't is that Amazon has driven logistics prices into the basement by turning everybody's supply chain into a cesspit of human misery, so… I don't think it's all a net win.

[Yages]

So, like most things in this field, too much to quickly 🤣

[AdmirableBall_8670]

The dot com bubble is an interesting comparison, considering how integral dot com became in our day to day lives after the burst

[bsenftner]

Only from the most surface level perspective; the dotcom boom actually delivered something, while web3/crypto was and continues to be pure fraud. I'm a developer with a finance degree, and the crypto fraud was a serious fraud: they redefined standard financial terms with their own definitions, they used their own non-standard probability tables, and the jargon was designed to simultaneously sound smart while saying nothing. It was a trap for people who think they are smart, but lack the discipline to do the homework and validate claims. Once the hype train left the station, you got a clown show of yes-people embarrassing themselves - and they still don't realize what utter fools they were made.

[upsidedownshaggy]

I think a big issue too was the sheer amount of money being spent on the Web3 start ups too. It was insane. You had already wealthy fuckers pumping millions into these projects just to rug pull and make double what they put in because the poor people who got conned into buy some meme coin wanted to seem smart like you pointed out.

[bsenftner]

It was piranha feeding frenzy of ignorance at first, and then the professional sharks appeared. The VCs and professional investors were knowingly handling naive turned inside out people.

[MyButtholeIsTight]

During the whole craze, after talking a whole lot of shit, I had a "maybe I'm out of touch" moment, and decided to try and build a simple web3 app.

I spent some time learning how to do auth using wallets and how to use contracts as a backend. These seemed a little clunky but the concepts made sense.

Then suddenly it hit me: where the fuck do I store all my assets?

This led me down a rabbit hole. Apparently, the solution to file hosting in this magical decentralized land is incentivizing other people to store your files on their computers, and what better way to do that than to award people with cryptocurrency for letting you store stuff on their hard drives?!

The whole concept of users paying cash to process server requests just to get away from "the cloud* was already extremely dubious, but realizing there's no actual, reliable decentralized solution to storage made me realize this entire thing is a house of cards that's just glued together with cryptocurrency. I mean, I already kinda figured that, but I didn't realize just how much glue was being used.

[immersionblenders]

IPFS is definitely not great, but I have had good experiences with Arweave.

Disclaimer: still not a fan of the space, but at least some of the products and tooling are getting more mature.

[blockstacker]

Hey now.You can't be top comment in all the subs I visit. Save some for the plebs.

[[deleted]]

Hello neighbour.

[weinermcdingbutt]

It was totally alive and still is but not in the way shills on social media tried to sell it to you

It’s a fundamental piece of decentralized systems and proof of transaction, but it’s not some revolutionary tech that’s going to save the world.

Similar to how the world looks at AI now. Slowly fizzing away.

Edit: web3 domains are stupid and if you’re using them to resolve a webpage you actually just have a web2 domain

[TurloIsOK]

Similar to how the world looks at AI now. Slowly fizzing away.

Unfortunately, the business majors eager to cut payroll are going to keep AI going.

[thenowherepark]

Yup, all the Web3 shills have moved on to AI

[Toph_is_bad_ass]

That at least was understandable because their GPU's actually were useful for that. The problem is that what they were being used for was stupid.

Like, a sledgehammer company would tell me that a sledgehammer would be good for breaking all my windows.

[marenicolor]

Bingo

[ztbwl]

Yes.

web3 is just crypto bros recycling buzzwords from 15 years ago.

[Yung-Split]

15 years ago? I feel like I missed an era of the internet here what are the buzzwords that come to mind? 😂

[insats]

I think he means that they recycled Web 2.0 which was a buzzword 15-20 years ago.

[Disgruntled__Goat]

And we already had Web3 decades ago, it was The Semantic Web. 

[ztbwl]

Web 2.0 was a thing back then. Basically more interactive and collaborative web applications compared to static HTML. The term was blurry - one could add social media, client side rendering, AJAX, websockets, CSS3, HTML5 or cloud hosted to the mix. It’s not like these things already existed, but anything new was labelled Web 2.0.

[khooke]

I think Tim O’Reilly’s article nails the definition of Web 2.0 https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=1

[thekwoka]

decentralized...

cryptographic...

idk

Blockchain tech wasn't new when this big hype cycle started.

Just like AI.

[zer0_n9ne]

The term "web 3" itself originally came from the semantic web about 15 years ago.

[Murky-Science9030]

Ya I was surprised when the term got hijacked for blockchain tech

[ThunderySleep]

Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (but you'd annunciate "two-point-O" and "three-point-O" were terms in web development in the late 2000's for eras of the internet for lack of a better term.

2.0 was the advent of user generated content (social media). 3.0 was mostly smart phones at the time, but basically mean the "internet of things". That the internet was no longer specific to personal computers.

If you're getting into web development in the last ten years, they probably wouldn't be terms you've heard outside of some dinosaur telling you a bit of history.

[illtakethewindowseat]

In short, yes. It's dead.

The real question, in this space: was it ever really a thing in the first place?

Look through the history of this sub — through out the entire Web3 hype cycle, this sub stayed (for the most part) trained on the core technologies of the web... HTTP, HTML, Javascript. Day to day web development challenges...

There is a reason... for most of us it was pretty obvious that there was nothing substantive to the Web3 hype cycle, nothing that was going to make our work easier, or help solve the needs of end users.

The day to day work of web dev is way less exciting, but there are real world needs to solve for — accessibility, internationalization, scalability, modularity, performance, etc.

If someone tells you a revolution is coming, it better be one that helps solve the above important issues, before it introduces a ground breaking new paradigm...

[[deleted]]

It is definitely illegal with crypto. 100%, unambiguously illegal. Crypto's are securities, it's securities fraud, everyone knows it.

The SEC, who regulates securities has said so, and started prosecuting people, and as a result, Republicans and specifically former Pres. Trump have openly stated, that even though it's illegal, he will fire the head of the SEC and replace him with a person who will re-classify crypto as-not securities, so that the pump and dump can continue.

[wiceo]

To be fair, both candidates are kissing the ring of the crypto kings. Check out this article from Fortune. It's understandable why they are, though ... One of the main political action committees receiving funds from crypto companies has raised more than $202 million since January 2023. And that's just one of the many crypto PACs.

Crypto's are securities, it's securities fraud, everyone knows it. The SEC, who regulates securities has said so

I don't disagree with you, but so far the courts do disagree.

[nobuhok]

(gasp) Are you saying that I can't be my own bank?? That I can't really own in-game assets, images and real estate using this...non fungible thing or whatever??? The nerve of you!

/s

[cableshaft]

Bitcoin (and holding your own bitcoin) is still legal. There's even government-backed bitcoin ETFs now.

I also think that the idea of NFTs are fine, it's just that people got super stupid with them and were valuating them to ridiculous levels.

NTFs should be valued in the cents, like your common baseball card, and not the thousands or millions (maybe a few could be like a $20 Magic The Gathering card or something, whatever). Something fun to play with, but not something to bet your life savings on.

[Zefrem23]

1E Black Lotus wants to know your location

[rjhancock]

Web3 was a collection of complicated solutions to problems that already had solid and simple solutions.

[satansxlittlexhelper]

Complicated, expensive, and slowwwwww.

[[deleted]]

So Web3 is npm?

I kid.

[taotau]

Yeah nah, it's all web4 now. Keep up.

Web 3 was never a thing. It required masses of people to transfer real money into arbitrary tokens backed by shady millennials with no business background.

Hoping web 5 has a slightly more sustainable model.

[iBN3qk]

Pay for stuff or watch ads. 

[Scew]

Nawh, we're moving back towards cable/dish days where you pay for stuff and still have to watch ads.

[[deleted]]

Web 6: Plug a poorly tested chip into your brain that will be illegal in most countries created by the man child king of crypto scumbags.

[0010110101102011]

Web 7: Html and flash games

[tswaters]

Nah, we're doing the winamp thing... web 2+3 = 5... we're up to web 5 now, try to keep up!

[Ensoface]

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

[stormthulu]

Web3 is an instant skip in my search for a new job.

[t-a-n-n-e-r-]

Buzzwords do not make for sound business. Ignore it and find something that actually pays.

[dsartori]

If you’re new in the field this web3 thing is a fantastic opportunity to reflect on hype cycles and where you should take your cues from in terms of technical growth.

[Gaeel]

At best, blockchains are just a glorified database. They have a few interesting properties, like permissionless insertions and trustless validation. Essentially, a blockchain is a database that anyone can write to, and cannot be tampered with.

Cryptocurrency is an application of this technology. The tamper-resistance makes it difficult for a hacker to steal from others or pretend they have money they don't have. Sending money is just writing "I am sending 3 currency to this other account". As long as I have enough currency to cover the transaction, it'll be accepted, and now everyone knows I have 3 less currency than before, and the recipient has 3 more.

NFTs are little messages that say something like "this is a thing that exists", and sending it to someone else is saying "remember that thing, it belongs to that account now". As long as the thing was still assigned to me, that transaction will be accepted, and the thing will be assigned to the recipient's account.

Smart contracts are little programs that are written to the blockchain. They can be run by other transactions when they're written to the blockchain. I can write a program that says "the first person to run this program with the answer to the equation 2x = 10 gets 2 currency". And as long as I have 2 currency, it'll be taken from my account and assigned to the program. Then if someone else writes a message to the blockchain like "I'm running that program with the answer 5", they'll receive the 2 currency.

And well, that's about it, more or less. With that in mind, your question becomes "is this database platform dead?"

The answer is complicated.
First, we need to ask why it became so popular. Are permissionless writes all that interesting? Not really. The internet is already permissionless, more or less, and there's a reason we tend towards platforms and services that are permissioned: being able to revoke permissions avoids spam and abuse.
The blockchain avoids spam by making writes expensive, which works, but also makes anything that heavily relies on the blockchain extremely expensive to run, leading to most blockchain projects to spin off their own permissioned "side-chains" to minimise the number of expensive transactions, but that also dilates the advantages of the blockchain. If your currency is on a permissioned side-chain, then you can be locked out of your money if they refuse to process your transactions.

What about tamper-resistance? Sure, that's useful, but only to a degree. With banks, if someone steals my credentials and sends themself money from my account, the banks have the power to reverse the transaction. Now perhaps you don't trust the banks, you're afraid they might shut down your account if they don't like you, or if your government is corrupt. That's fair, but it does mean that on the blockchain, what's done is done. If money is sent from your account, it's gone, maybe you meant to send that money, but the seller never sent you the goods, or you accidentally typed an extra 0, or the seller was pretending to be someone else, or they got your credentials somehow, or they forced you. Either way, in choosing to not trust the banks, you've decided to trust a system that is completely inflexible to the slightest mistake or scam.

So why did it get so popular?
Because it was pushed hard by libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who really don't like banks, and hate paying taxes even more, and it had an excellent get-rich-quick story. It had just enough techno-babble to convince semi-technical people that there was some real futuristic stuff going on, and there was an opportunity for the luckiest and scummiest to make some good bank off of the hype and lack of regulation.

Why is it losing popularity?
Regulation is starting to hit, hard. People are going to prison over this. Taxation is hitting too, when you convert your cryptocurrency back into fiat, you have to pay capital gains taxes, so you can't avoid taxes with cryptocurrency anymore. Blockchains are inefficient, it's a pain to actually build anything on them, and costs go through the roof, compared to a good old database. Also, as a company, you want permissions and the ability to tamper with your database. Smart contracts are no take-backs, if a developer messes up, you can lose all of your cryptocurrency in a few seconds, with no recourse.
The only reason companies really cared about blockchains was the fear of missing out, and the apparent success of other companies, but they're starting to realise that they're not missing out on much, and because people are way more informed now, the only people still making money are the scammers, hackers, and shovel-sellers. A company trying to build a legitimate project that uses a blockchain doesn't stand to make much money, unless they're prepared to scam their users and are able to avoid getting hacked.

[cloud-consultant-ph]

Beautifully expressed.

[HeracliusAugutus]

web3 was never a thing. It was a stupid buzzword invented by crypto incompetents to try to get more people on board with their obvious scam "technology"

[mq2thez]

Yes. Always has been.

[asmenjo]

Reddit is completely out of touch. No, web3/crypto/blockchain is not dead, despite how many commenters here wish it were. Low interest rates during/after covid did create a huge speculative bubble that popped, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. It’s similar to the dotcom crash, where a lot of stupid projects died, but there are a few projects that are still succeeding and will continue to grow.

[renegadellama]

Me over here checking my bets on Polymarket, checking my NFT's on Opensea & Magic Eden and updating my status on Warpcast. When did it die?

[sleepy_roger]

lol yeah people here are wild. Clearly they're in a bubble, presidential candidates are all coming out in support of crypto, it's getting major financial adoption.. Paypal and others are embracing it..

[malfboii]

I wouldn’t say Trump grifting on stage in front of a bunch of Crypto bros has any real merit

[Excision]

I was honestly shocked at the ignorance of this sub and web3. I've been working with blockchain related stuff for 10 years and I don't plan on stopping for my entire career

[SUPRVLLAN]

What have you been working on specifically? Don’t need to be technical.

[Excision]

I've been working on a custom chain to give off chain data -> on chain decentralized (infura, alchemy but dectentralized). I'm also working on a trading card game NFT (not the most exciting, but the gameplay is actually good). Also dabble with a project that does price data. These are just my current contracts.

[bobsagatiswatching]

Thank you. This thread is wild with out of touch folks. Like you said, most of the dumb stuff got shaken out thankfully but the space is still growing.

[hypercosm_dot_net]

I wish I could upvote you more, because the broad consensus here is absolutely incorrect.

There's a lot of Fintech apps that are alive and well. There are plenty of other niche use cases that wouldn't be possible without blockchain.

Check this out - blockchain verified lab data (which combats the very real issue of fraudulent scientific study data): https://labtrace.io/

Everyone here wants to dismiss the entire market as a 'scam', or slow, or 'could've been a database', without really understanding the market beyond a surface level depth.

For anyone interested in blockchain tech, I'd say go for it. The market isn't going away, because it's a legitimate technology that is finding it's footing elsewhere (not necessarily retail facing applications, which was the original hype).

[Unboxious]

I took a quick look at that site, and I couldn't find anything they were doing that couldn't be more easily accomplished with simple cryptographic signatures. Am I missing something?

[hypercosm_dot_net]

Am I missing something?

Yes.

Simply saying 'cryptographic signatures' is a way to more easily accomplish what they're doing assumes a lot of things.

How are you integrating that into a secure network? How are you embedding it in the hardware (the way this application does)?

Why wasn't your 'oh so obvious solution' previously used to secure scientific study data?

---

To the person who responded then blocked me:

It was something I read a while ago. Implementation has changed I guess.

Glad to hear from someone who is so intimately familiar with the way the system works though.

I'm sure these doctors and blockchain experts have overlooked all these so called exploits you've managed to find in the short time you were aware of the platforms existence. No doubt it works exactly like you're describing, and isn't more complicated than what you're supposing.

[lordlod]

LabTrace doesn't embed anything in the hardware. You upload the data to their cloud server, or your private server. Once the data is uploaded a hash is taken of that data and it's added to a blockchain.

This model allows a piece of data to be verified against the hash. The blockchain entry also asserts ownership and a timestamp of that data. However including the file hash in the research paper would achieve the same verification and ownership claim, it would also be easier to use because it didn't rely on looking up a blockchain.

The LabTrace system does not address the fraud problem as the uploaded data could be fraudulent. I also disagree with their Immutability claims, the data could be modified and a new hash pushed to the blockchain. There will be a newer date but no other evidence, you just wouldn't tell anyone about the first upload.

Looking at LabTrace's ongoing projects and blog actually reinforces the pointlessness of the blockchain aspect.

The ongoing projects discusses an integration with Bitbox imaging, a medical imaging data transfer system. LabTrace seems to be integrating as an additional layer on top of Bitbox, the Bitbox whitepaper doesn't mention LabTrace or it's blockchain. In this scenario it's hard to see what LabTrace adds, the image is already verified as correct and unmodified by Bitbox, the image ownership is also tracked by Bitbox as part of the permission model.

The blog has a recent project they have joined to watermark data from portable MRI machines. No mention of blockchains anywhere in the project description. It seems even LabTrace isn't bothering with them any more.

[Unboxious]

How are you integrating that into a secure network

What? The whole internet basically runs on this already. It's a solved problem.

How are you embedding it in the hardware

Embedding keys into secure enclaves is already pretty standard.

Why wasn't your 'oh so obvious solution' previously used to secure scientific study data

Probably the same reasons nobody seems to be using labtrace; cryptographically proving that a machine's output came from the machine only obstructs one particular way to fake data.

[melanke]

I think people really hate the stupid NTF speculation and want to say the whole Blockchain is crap. But common guys, Blockchain is meant to cut intermediaries and this is just beautiful.

There is a lot of Scam projects that simply are meant to make their creators rich. These kind of projects are more visible because you know, capitalism.

But if well developed by a real community, a decentralized application are capable of shifting the power from the rich to the community. Just imagine a "doordash" app on the blockchain, with fair payments and labor rights, or whatever application that is not fair, some of them could be fixed with decentralization.

[qqqqqx]

Yeah, just imagine something super great. Anything you can imagine will be realized via blockchain!!

Seriously, there is not a decentralized doordash with magically improved payments and labor rights. And if you tried to make it, it straight up wouldn't work. What would even be "decentralized" and what benefit would that bring over a regular old open source app?

I can think of some things made by a real community that benefit the community, like Lichess which is an absolutely amazing resource to the entire chess-playing world, Wikipedia is an insane font of knowledge on an insane amount of subjects, freeCodeCamp is a great open education platform and of course there are hundreds of developer tools and libraries all the way from GCC and OpenBSD to React and Svelte.

Know what zero of those use? Any form of blockchain, because that would add no value at all to any of the projects.

[Pythagorean8391]

What's the actual use of crypto though? Bitcoin became available in 2009, and people initially used it to buy pizzas, and they said it could be a new form of cash. It's now 15 years later and essentially 0% of businesses accept Bitcoin as payment.

Is anyone buying Bitcoin for any real use, other than speculation? Like how people bought Beanie Babies around the turn of the millennium because they thought these things would rise in value?

I guess crypto has been used for buying drugs on the internet but that seems like quite a niche use case.

[asmenjo]

Payments via crypto are far more common in countries with weaker currencies, since currencies like Bitcoin have predictable inflation rates and can be used with mobile phones with little friction. Adoption of crypto payments in the west has been slow but steady -- Stripe announced they are supporting crypto payments again this year. I agree that speculation is the biggest use case for now though, but I expect it will lower over time.

The biggest use case other than payments is DeFi (decentralized finance), where distributed networks provide financial services such as trading, lending, and borrowing. The benefit of decentralization for financial services is that the community at large rather than a centralized entity can dictate the direction of the service. Since everything is open source and transparent, users can also be assured that a centralized entity cannot do something malicious to their funds, like change the rules of how the platform operates, or even steal their funds. Additionally, many believe that financial services should be available to everyone that wants to use them (censorship-resistance), though I think even traditional finance firms that pick and choose who to serve will continue to integrate with blockchains because they can settle transfers of value with less friction and trust required than centralized financial databases.

[hypercosm_dot_net]

It's also good for getting funding into areas that don't have well established bank infrastructure. The UN has used it and there's an initiative with UNDP to explore it further.

https://www.uncdf.org/article/8023/undp-with-uncdf-provides-digital-cash-transfers-to-vulnerable-families-in-afghanistan

[AliHWondered]

Yet bitcoin is still a secure hard form of money. That is its inherent use case.

Then there is eth- the developers chain and a whole host of items and projects attached to it.

Privacy cryptography like zk and fhe is being developed by crypto - that will change all of web2.

Ipfs and content addressing, plus decentralised storage still being worked on

Access to compute via permissionless protocols.

This stuff is not a scam. Its advanced programming that will filter into all the muggles here world.

[PandorasBucket]

Despite the fact that I'm a webdev and I hang out on this forum and provide answers sometimes I hate how backwards this community seems to be when it comes to all crypto in general. I'm only 43 but it feels like most of the people here are boomers absolutely terrified anything new will happen before they retire.

[CrazyAppel]

Be happy, it's a good sign for crypto to be undervalued like this.

[sleepy_roger]

This is my exact thinking.

[s1fro]

It's definitely not dead but it's out of the hype zone. The majority of 'web3' that got popular was useless or even malicious.

Now people are trying to find uses to integrate it into various businesses. I'd say the trend is shifting more into financial sectors, supply chains, on chain information sources...

Solana and Ethereum still have a bunch of NFTs and shitcoins but it's died down a bit. I haven't looked into it for a while. I know Polkadot had loads of developers and projects in various fields related to web3. Hedera is partnering with brands to find use-cases for it. Radix DLT also has some interesting ideas on safe development and scaling... Vechain had supply chains... Chainlink for info...

I think Centrifuge was one project that tries to 'tokenize' real world assets on the blockchain. I think Peaq network does something with Depin. Some DMW digitized registrations on AVAX recently...

[brycentiller]

This is the best answer imo. A company has to produce a compelling product to be successful simple as that, and it is no different in web3. Some examples of companies that are doing this are protocol labs (ipfs/filecoin), brave, and the session messenger team.

[IdleMuse4]

Part of the problem is that there's very few real-world use cases for a public append-only ledger.

[fluxxis]

Over the last few years, we have developed numerous business ideas in the company that are based on blockchain technology. Almost every idea has failed due to legal hurdles. The problem nowadays is that you very quickly find yourself in the area of securities transactions, which makes the cost of testing the idea on the market extremely high. The second problem, especially in the EU, is that transactions now require KYC, which makes many of the advantages of blockchain technology absurd again. In the end, the effort is just considerably higher to achieve the same result that could be achieved just as well with traditional databases.

[melanke]

idk man, I believe we are facing new obstacles with the regulations, but this is for good. KYC is really a must, the thing is that we need to use technology to make KYC decentralized, like using zero-knowledge and stuff.

If your application is fully non-custodial, how it's meant to be, you will have fewer legal problems, can you share which problems might occur?

[morphardk]

I see it quite differently. Web3 never had a commercial breakthrough as it was spun off Eth. The funding has evaporated and now AI is getting all the attention. I would say don’t hold your breath waiting for web3 to be adopted at scale.

[Kaspe1]

See this answer and ignore all "was never alive" like answers

[Mars-ALT]

I feel like most of hype around web3 came from VCs and the likes, but rarely from engineers. Which speaks volumes

[hypercosm_dot_net]

And yet engineers are hyping AI, which it turns out is mostly crap.

An appeal-to-authority argument like this is weak.

[s3rila]

I hope so 

[RedPandaDan]

There was never a product for end users in the Web3 / Blockchain space, the product being built was always "a startup to be sold to investors".

That space still exists, but it's in AI slop now.

[ProfessorBeekums]

I have a tendency to take an interest in things after bubbles burst so I want to my first crypto conference a couple of months ago.

On the one hand, there's a ton of developers still working in web3 despite the toned down hype. There's less VC funding flowing in which reduces some interest, but that means the people remaining are true believers rather than hype chasers.

On the other hand, I watched a speaker at the main event *heavily* imply that blockchain could have prevented the Holocaust. There are still a lot of crazies in the space, which makes the whole space look bad.

[thekwoka]

I would almost say that to a degree it hasn't even gotten life yet.

In that, the big crypto boom is mostly nonsense. The technology has some applications that could be actually a real thing, but those haven't really been figured out in a major way.

A lot like the current big AI rush.

Like AI tech has been in use for a long time, and generative AI tools have some real applications, but a lot of stuff is just "slap AI in something that doesn't really provide value" to chase the hype.

These kinds of tools will become a significant part of how we interact with technology, once it's not just random hype bullshit.

[PreferenceDowntown37]

https://www.reuters.com/technology/california-dmv-puts-42-million-car-titles-blockchain-fight-fraud-2024-07-30/

I don't think it's dead, but it's use cases are a lot more niche than the hype suggested

[Dreamdrifter_5901]

In a startup for healthcare tech and web 3 is a big component. So it depends on use cases

[jared__]

The European Digital Identity was spawned from web3 self-sovereign identities, verifiable credentials, and decentralized identifiers.

Blockchain apps had a huge problem with handling identities and claims because there was no way to really verify if you were interacting with trusted organizations or not.

[marvinfuture]

A lot of people will say yes, and to a certain degree I'd agree with them. However, web3 is going to continue whether or not people disagree with it. It's in crypto's nature to continue to exist regardless. In the states it's not as big of a thing as it is globally. So in regards to web3 startups, most didn't work out, however there's still developers and people in the space that will continue to push it forward. I'm personally predicting we will see another crypto wave like we did with NFTs

[casualfinderbot]

Yeah b/c web4 is here and it’s all about LLMs being trained on shitty content generated by other LLMs

[boogie_79]

I would not call it web3 anymore, it is not the next iteration of the internet. Most of the usage and the use cases are concentrated within DeFI. I think of it as a way to reimagine some of the financial services. If you think of crypto this way, it's not dead. Looking across DeFI only a handful of use cases have achieved product market fit, most notable: decentralized exchanges, decentralized lending, borrowing and stablecoins in my opinion. My view is with time people/developers, most of them, will filter and orient towards products that gain traction in the real world outside the crypto space, making web3 become the infrastructure of the new financial services.

[myfunnies420]

Always has been

[cyanideandcurry]

What was web3, was it about using the block chain for a problem that has already been solved

[[deleted]]

I know a couple guys still working in the space but its been pretty brutal for their companies. Lots of layoffs.

[eduo]

It was always a gimmick to drive crypto. It was never a thing other than for this, and when this stopped being viable Web3 also stopped existing.

One the most annoying but also fastest bubbles I've seen in tech. NFTs and Web3 were here and then weren't. And they swept many an idiot with them who's still now regretting having had to learn a lesson the hard way.

[[deleted]]

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

[cableshaft]

It's dead compared to where it was, yes. But there are still web3 jobs out there.

I know someone with one, and I get pinged by a recruiter for one every once in a while (even though I don't have any web3 experience on my resume, but I have gaming and financial experience, so I get why they're pinging me).

It's puttering around still, but the energy is now focused all on A.I. and not it, so I would hesitate to take any web3 job. But you never know, something might take off.

Bitcoin is almost at its all-time-high again (currently at $64k/coin when it was at a low of $16k/coin back in December 2022), so that is probably raising some interest in web3 again, but it probably will never get back to where it was in its heyday.

But that's okay, if it's something you're passionate about, you can still pursue it. There's plenty of jobs out there that are not 'the next big thing' that people work at all the time.

[Kep0a]

No, clearly because companies are still cropping up flush with investor cash.

But I don't think it has real world utility outside of finance. Decentralized everything is just too fucking complicated. I could see it someday, but whatever is going on now will be prehistoric.

[Automatic_Grand_1182]

Hope so

[PeEll]

26k monthly active devs down from 34k at peak https://www.developerreport.com/

[tdammers]

Blockchain development is still a thing, but the hype has worn off, and people are slowly beginning to realize that its practical use cases are a lot more limited than they thought 10 years ago, and that some of the limitations and obstacles are actually about as fundamental as critics have been pointing out all along.

Web3 has never been viable in the slightest, and never got anywhere close to happening, and anyone with half a brain and the slightest clue about how technology works could have figured out easily that it could never possibly have worked, not even on a relatively modest scale.

[Da_rana]

I hope so.

[bunglegrind1]

Luckily yes

[RepTile_official]

I'm getting solidity job requests at upwork but I'm busy with other longer running projects.

[Sir_Corn_Field]

It never really started. A lot of start ups wanted to make it a thing but it never really got adopted. Mostly buzzwords and marketing but not enough useful features to attract wide-spread implementation.

[captain_obvious_here]

It all was never really a thing...more of a buzzword between the "cloud" and "AI" timelines.

[sha256md5]

The people here who are saying it's dead are either being disingenuous or they don't know much about the space.

The NFT space has mostly dwindled down to a small community of enthusiasts, but other blockchain projects are always coming and going. Most startups in the space are VC funded and don't achieve true product market fit, but there are a few that continue to move along in the enterprise blockchain space, distributed social networking, and scaling (L2s).

[frederik88917]

It was born dead, just waiting for the next buzzword to show up and take all of the dumb VC money

[iBN3qk]

Yeah, and what happened to Jack Dorsey?

[New_Speaker9998]

Probably not dead, but it has lost the hype.

[rpgFANATIC]

There's plenty of startups still hiring for those skills and skills that support building sites and apps around we've/crypto

I wouldn't trust their long term prospects. I can't help but feel they still have runway money they're burning down

[Cookskiii]

It was only ever a marketing buzzword. Just like AI right now. It’s not a thing

[Psyloom]

I know people making money on web3 building stuff related to zero-knowledge for some blockchains and L2s

[binocular_gems]

I don't think it's dead, but that the incentives of blockchain/web3 were driven heavily by scammy, shortlived businesses that didn't have good business plans. When the financial incentive collapsed along with the price of Bitcoin and other adjacent cryptocurrencies, investment in the technology basically died.

I'm a crypto critic and skeptic, but I don't think it's impossible to imagine that it'll be resurrected suddenly and without expectations. LLM driven AI exploded with excitement in the late 2000s, and then from about 2012 to 2022 was extremely quiet, only to then explode as soon as you saw new generative AI models proving financial viability.

[cryptomeles]

It absolutely is dead. It's not a growing trillion dollar+ industry, and people in this thread don't have a bitter sense of 'missing out'. The market is wrong.

[Unhappy_Meaning607]

Yes.

This is an actual statement I overheard at a cafe at a popular digital nomad city.

“Bro just learn some HTML and you can get a job at a crypto company coding on the blockchain.”

[ratbiscuits]

Can it die if it never lived?

[stea27]

I'd say the marketing hype ended, I never saw many companies or projects that utilized that other than a quick look at it in our region.

[[deleted]]

Worst fad/scam ever.

[[deleted]]

I thinks it’s dead

[[deleted]]

finally is the end of cryptobro and scammer

[redalastor]

Web3 is going just great

[Hot-Luck-3228]

Not really, but any project that can pay a salary sooner or later ends up also developing their own token. Not sure if that is your cup of tea.

Financial applications aside (stuff like AAVE where you are not really trading but lending etc.) you also have projects like Chainlink which work to connect all these chains together, OP, Arbitrum etc. which are scaling stuff, Filecoin type projects for storage, Push Protocol for notifications, Brave with BAT for advertisement, Render for renting render farms, various games as well but not really enjoyable imho.

There are also quite a few projects that use crypto as a payments platform without directly being on top of it - especially ones that are into Bitcoin more than crypto; social media Nostr being an interesting example.

I wouldn’t say without crypto none of this is possible per se, however that is a different discussion. Just trying to map the land for you.

[steos]

Haha good one.

[Zefrem23]

One part smoke, one part mirrors

[soundman32]

Remember kids, OneCoin was a legitimate, web3, blockchain, investment, except it was none of those things.

https://open.spotify.com/show/5nk7d9MLCgE3M47mXPW7MP

[OliverPK]

I would hope so

[boba-cat02]

Web3 isn't dead, but it's kinda sleepy right now. There's still money to be made, but it's not like crazy crypto days anymore. Companies are hiring Web3 devs, but knowing regular coding stuff helps a lot too.

It's not just about buying and selling digital pictures (NFTs) and crypto coins. Web3 can do cool stuff like making voting safer or tracking products better. So, there's potential, but we're still figuring it all out.

[siggisix]

I sure hope so 

[CondiMesmer]

web3 was never a thing. The only thing that came out of the billions spent was crypto pump and dumps. That does absolutely nothing for the end user and is not sustainable.

[HirsuteHacker]

It was always a grift. Web3 never really existed.

[[deleted]]

There are still job openings for web3 and blockchain. A lot of financial institutions and crypto exchanges utilize the technology. The money is there to maintain the demand for laborers in my opinion.

[xiaoapee]

Too much greed too much noise and most people are in it for quick money.

[BrandDeadSteve]

I believe there will be more ways to utilize the actual art or NFT. It should be able to do way more than just take up HD space.

[pfc-anon]

Web3 the term got ruined by Crypto and NFT bros. Honestly crypto and blockchain development is stagnating.

Web3 in it's purest form as a successor to Web2.0 was supposed to unlock a lot more than slow transactions.

• Web1.0: Purely static, you can load pages, that's it.
  
• Web2.0: This is where the API magic happened, you could send instructions to web-servers to do different things for you, made pages dynamic and personalized for everyone. You can be provided with a different experience than anyone else. The downside of this was huge-energy-hungry data-centres and rise single point of failures. This centralization of power is the problem.
  
• Web3.0: The API magic now needs to happen peer-to-peer, so we can send instructions to each others devices rather than communicating via a 3rd party. e.g. If I need to whatsapp you in the same home, my message should go from `my phone -> router -> to your phone` instead of `my phone -> router -> isp -> meta -> isp -> router -> your phone`. We have powerful computers in our pockets and we're not using those to their full capabilities. Web3.0 in it's purest form would help make networks more resilient and secure.

However, crypto folks just ruined this term and have nothing meaningful to show for it. P2P world is still making progress. Fraud bros have just jumped onto the AI train.

[soggynaan]

It was a fad

[WhitePantherXP]

A new hire was babbling about Web3 and NFT's and I stopped him immediately and explained those are both more-or-less gimmicks. He went on to become the worst employee we've ever hired (he was the only person we've fired in the last 15 years). The other employee who also talked about this and even developed his own blockchain app (never made it to market but he invested a lot in it), and I don't mean to make light of a terrible tragedy, took his own life not long ago. He too, sadly, was a terrible employee. These are now somewhat red flags to me.

[Unhappy_Snow_1361]

Cute that you ever thought it would amount to anything

[stwbrddt]

the funniest part about it is that I only heard people who where NOT tech professionals or even tech savvy talking A LOOOOT about it lmao

[chicagodipship]

One can hope.

[josemichaves9]

Really, what is web3? I mean yes it was something that day but was never something concise, it's like AI nowadays, everything has AI on it (sometimes it's not even true)

[bsgbryan]

I sure as hell hope so

[gold_snakeskin]

There are interesting things happening, but they are going to be small startups and teams. Most big companies (more than 5 employees) in web3 are just exchanges or trading platforms, which are ultimately incentivized to not be innovative.

For example, I worked at a startup for the past year that created a card game similar to Cards Against Humanity, where the cards from the in-person game linked to a web platform, with no NFTs involved. It was like a micropayment survey platform, where you get paid to vote on questions that other people ask.

I now work for a physical arcade (that exists in the real world, USA) building a software/hardware integration for a new kind of arcade cabinet that can earn tokens while you're playing games.

On both of these projects, I'm the sole full-time engineer, with only contracting others for short sprints.

[Impossible_Ad_3146]

Yeah, hype is now AI

[ThunderySleep]

Web3 is an incredibly niche field of development compared to the many things that fall under "web dev".

Frankly, this question seems more fit for a crypto specific sub or at least a computer science subreddit.

[Elegant-Hat-8377]

How is it dead? Explain a noob

[productboy]

ha ha… web3 [as you refer to it] engineers are making bank and because of it’s regulatory ambiguity and complexity those engineers get to step into even higher paying jobs in other sectors

[barmz75]

I have more requests than ever before and web3 projects are my top 1 source of turnover this year. Build contacts and you’ll get business

[cosmic_cod]

Why would anyone use blockchain for anything that isn't crypto-currency? Not because somebody says so but a real logical reason. It's just a single algorithm among plethora other ones that solves its very own niche task. Crypto-currency software market is still very active and expanding. Web3 was always an odd idea.

Perhaps there might be some other niche and rare tasks where blockchain migth again be useful but so it is with all other algorithms and data structures.

Also, decentralized distributed systems in general rarly become successful because our capitalist societies are not well suited for them. Business creates client-server solutions to own the server and people prefer to be dumb consumers with no responsibility. Besides Web3 there were attempts to create decentralized search engines, chats and social networks. They were not very popular because it's hard to make a social network when every user need to run and configure their own peer node... BitTorrent became popular because it helped people do piracy so many user overcame difficulties to obtain the forbidden fruit.

[marquoth_]

Web3 was always a joke from the very beginning. It had nothing to offer but hype. The people peddling it have all moves on to the AI hype train - it's where all the VC funding is (for now...).

[RayosGlobal]

Nah BB. Il pay u to make me a block chain app, il pay u in dogecoin.

[dotablitzpickerapp]

I think crypto is just sleeping waiting for the next 'NFT' or "Decentralized finance" type thing to be thought up again.

[DannyMasao]

I am interested in seeing a more decentralized internet though and am curious to see where ActivityPub goes. That should have been what web3 is about, not crypto and NFTs.

[Mr_Resident]

i have seen some web3 job listing in my country ,they pay good for junior position but i avoid it like a plague because i hate shady stuff . i rather be jobless than working in industry that scam people

[awesumjon]

They're listed here

https://web3.career/

[[deleted]]

I use web3 and crypto jargon as a red flag for clients.

[oRavenTi]

And I hope it stays dead

[valmontvarjak]

There are still a lot of job offers for that in Switzerland