How to build a bridge from Web2 to Web3
Analysis conducted by Crypto.com’s industry-leading research team found that the global crypto population grew by 178% in 2021, with the total number of crypto users approaching 300 million. While the reach of the crypto community and the amount of cryptocurrency gained significant ground in 2021, it still represents less than 4% of the global population and less than 7% of the worldwide internet population, with considerable room for incremental growth.
On the other hand, we see that users are more involved in the community as investors than as accurate Web3 users. Even in terms of the number of users in the most active NFT market, there is a considerable gap compared to the number of users on traditional internet platforms. OpenSea announced in January 2022 that the number of active wallets exceeded 1 million, not the actual number of users. There is a huge opportunity to get most traditional Internet users into Web3, via building an application that is easy to use and can be used for a long time.
There are a large number of new users who are curious about the crypto community. Still, most of them do not have sufficient investment experience to be able to participate in a trader role. They need another scenario that can replace some of their previous daily needs and integrate cryptocurrency practices into it so that they can eventually become part of the community.
Game-Fi is an excellent attempt to compensate for the current user’s demand for playability with the profitability offered by Game-Fi games compared to traditional games. However, medium-heavy games tend to pursue depth in the game background, design style, and gameplay to enhance playability, which can improve the loyalty of heavy players, but significantly limit the ability of users to enter widely. When the entry of new users begins to decline, it will directly lead to the game’s economic model spiral down.
Some Move-to-Earn applications that combine Game-Fi with lifestyle have exploded with excellent results and become the product that truly breaks the community. The reason is that the product design based on users’ daily scenarios can minimize the barrier to entry, and the incentive and gamification design of Game-Fi enhances the degree of users’ willingness to enter and continue to use.
The combination of the two can produce a Web3 application with active users close to or even more than traditional Internet applications, bringing considerable new members to the crypto community, and the overall user value would be enormous.
OPPORTUNITIES IN THE READING SCENE
ReadON focus on the daily reading scene. Content reading includes news, articles, novels, videos, e-books, etc., which has long accounted for many users’ Internet usage. Great companies have been thriving in these sub-categories, while new disruptors can still stand out.
Take Newsbreak in the news space, for example, a company founded in 2015 that reached 12 million daily active users in January 2021 with a new distribution method for content. And their counterpart Bytedance, after getting 150 million daily activities with its product Toutiao, has launched TikTok, surpassing Facebook as the most downloaded app in the APP Store and Google play in 2021.
Therefore, as a daily need, the reading scene is one of the best channels to reach traditional Internet users. In the Web3 world, many projects have also made attempts in the content area, but we have yet to see a quality application that plays the role of a bridge.
On the creation side, Mirror tries to use NFT technology to address the creator's rights and reconstruct the relationship between the creator and his readers. However, its content still relies on traditional distribution channels, such as Twitter, which lacks community sharing and incentives for consumers (readers) and distributors. This can limit the scope of content distribution, easily confined to a small circle of the creator and his loyal fans, affecting the creator’s revenue.
Some Social-Fi projects try to make community engagement a goal by incentivizing each participant’s behavior through tokens, including many meaningless behaviors. The community is filled with low-quality postings, word-count comments, and cheap Likes. While incentives can bring a brief period of heat, the community lacks valuable content, and the number of community users cannot support the introduction of good enough creators. Eventually, the community becomes a graveyard for spam.
Some other blockchain media appear to have the ability to be that bridge. Still, if the content of these vertical communities remains solely for the crypto community, it will be difficult for general users to access them, even though token incentives. There is no way for the public users to accept a screen full of unknown terms from the cryptocurrency community and, in turn, give up on creating a wallet.
Therefore, to build a Web3 application in the reading scene and attract a wide range of users to the crypto community, there are several critical paths.
1. Provide effective incentives for content consumption and distribution behavior
2. Build a valuable content community and set up appropriate governance rules
3. Provide content on a wide range of topics, not limited to the cryptocurrency space
This is the goal that ReadON tries to achieve, to create a Read-Fi product that will bridge users to Web3 in a reading scenario with a broader user base.
About ReadON
ReadON is a decentralized content distribution platform which has created an incentive mechanism for consumers, curators and creators, along with a unique Topic-bound NFT design. ReadON seeks to help users efficiently and freely access quality content, break information silos, and explore a real new world.
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