Web 3.0 Founders Must Learn From AI Industry Success

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Discords and X threads aren’t fooling investors anymore. Web 3.0 founders must look towards AI to survive. Web 3.0 founders have to pivot.

The AI (artificial intelligence) industry has demonstrated itself to be far more apt at innovating than Web 3.0, which as an industry must accept defeat in a way and reorganize.

It would behoove AI founders to take a page out of the book of big AI companies, which have impacted lives and scooped up a big market share in short order – leaving crypto very much in the dust when it comes to the mindshare of crypto in the global consciousness versus AI.

Web 3.0 founders must ask themselves, ‘What can we learn?’

As AI becomes more powerful, and it will do so quickly, Web 3.0 will quickly become a subservient industry, dependent upon the whims of the almighty big technology corporations in control of AI technology.

Web 3.0 will likely only become lucrative and impactful by partnering with AI companies.

Web 3.0’s decentralization, which has resulted in thousands of projects promising all sorts of decentralized versions of apps that already exist, has led to the general public – including investors – not understanding which projects are for real.

Investors simply don’t know which projects can achieve results or are even offering a solution to a real problem.

DAOs, DeFi protocols and metaverse land rushes are largely a cacophony of Discord servers, Telegram groups and X threads.

For many Western investors, these business models are completely foreign. The business models of AI companies, including startups, are far more familiar.

In addition, Web 3.0 has gained a bit of a reputation for being associated with hype and scams.

The AI industry, on the other hand, has forged a clearer path towards deals that make a difference.

AI companies aren’t shilling tokens based on future promises, writing convoluted whitepapers and posting endlessly online.

They’re building groundbreaking technology from the ground up. In the AI industry, the cream has risen quickly to the top.

The world knows that it is companies like xAI, OpenAI, Google and others that dominate the marketplace.

Investors know that real innovation doesn’t come from a 10,000 NFT (non-fungible token) collection. BlackRock will tokenize bonds, not NFTs.

Partners want to make deals with the AI behemoths building out the world-changing infrastructure, such as cloud providers, chipmakers or platforms like xAI’s Grok, which has revolutionized the way in which humanity seeks out information.

Unfortunately for those of us in the Web 3.0 space – for now at least – these companies are building the future, not Web 3.0 startups.

Centralization is winning the day over decentralization. The fragmentation in Web 3.0 – the fierce competition over so little – is not nearly as appetizing to investors and strategic partners as AI monopolies.

Web 3.0 companies should start looking to partner with those companies sitting on a vast GPU supply or a proprietary data organization.

These are the companies – the ones that control algorithms – getting inventor funds.

A new way forward for crypto

Web 3.0 founders are left with no other option than to pivot. The industry has to face it and move towards a new strategy.

Big money has found it difficult to navigate the decentralized web of Web 3.0 companies.

Instead, centralized powerhouses are the ones building the future, and they could step into the crypto arena at any time and potentially outcompete crypto native incumbents.

It’s time for crypto to move on from its messaging chat and X strategy, as well as the promises of decentralization, and start working the phones to get into the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies touching technology.

It’s high time to deliver.

The idealism of Web 3.0 is proving not to mesh with reality. The quest for decentralization, ownership and democratized value creation has stalled.

In the future, Web 3.0 might further fragment.

The biggest blockchains, such as Ethereum and Solana, will begin to pin their fates on centralized solutions, increasingly looking like the tech gatekeepers they once billed themselves as disrupting.

The blockchains of tomorrow will exist as integrations into the traditional financial and technology giants, which are looking for supply chain tracking and similar solutions.

For the blockchain world, these solutions are the quickest way to real-world utility and a monopoly.

The more lofty solutions, such as decentralized data storage, are not making much progress when it comes to market share.

Memecoins, redundant DeFi protocols and incomplete metaverses are already suffering under the strain of zero sum competition between one another.

There is no crypto community. The incestuous strategic partnerships of crypto projects with each other have resulted in limited innovation.

It’s time for Web 3.0 founders to make a change. Billion-dollar partnerships are made via access to C-Suites of the world’s biggest companies – not in the world of hashtags or virtual land.

The Web 3.0 companies that don’t adapt to the fact that Web 3.0 has fallen far behind the AI industry in terms of innovation won’t be around for long.

Manouk Termaaten is the founder and CEO of Vertical Studio AI. He is a serial entrepreneur and expert in AI technologies, aiming to make AI accessible for everyone via customization tools and affordable computers.

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