Web3 Demystified: A Special Report

The prominence of blockchain, cryptocurrency and especially NFTs collectively experienced a meteoric rise throughout 2021, with venture capital funds raising as much as $25 billion for related firms and startups in these spaces.

As Facebook rebranded to Meta Platforms in acknowledgment of its own advancement into the metaverse — a term widely used to encapsulate the vision of virtual living integrating seamlessly with the real world — “Web3” also grew more prominent as the appropriate classification for a world more digitally reliant than ever, particularly in the wake of the pandemic.

“Web3 Demystified,” the new special report from Variety Intelligence Platform, takes an analytic and data-driven approach across 18 pages to covering the metamorphosis of the web eras preceding and leading into Web3, alongside the roles in which blockchain, NFTs and the metaverse feed into this enthusiasm (and, to some degree, hysteria).

Given the stock tumble of many cryptocurrencies and companies dependent on them throughout May, including so-called “stablecoin” TerraUSD, whose collapse resulted in more than $83 billion lost in market value, now is as good a time as ever to assess what exactly Web3’s biggest proponents see in what they envision as a fully decentralized reality of cash flow to rights owners.

What Web3 could be and what its earliest incarnations amount to are still very different worlds, with many big corporations themselves finding ways to enter this market and utilize it for their own handling of IP rights, especially when it comes to Big Media and the studio system.

Even if crypto and NFTs are in a state of uncertainty and disarray, the amount of interest and investment in these spaces means we are far from seeing the full degree of attempts to bring Web3 to life.