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Ask HN: What happened to Web3 startups?
I guess most of them still have some runway left with the VC or ICO money they raised. How is it to work at such a place after the hype and after the sentiment turned negative?
- 29_29 3y agoMy friends in Web3 are now AI experts building chatbots
- victorsup 3y agolike 90%
- lloydatkinson 3y agoI think everyone knew they’d move onto the next scam
- graypegg 3y agoAt least applications built upon the “we call the OpenAI api” product strategy are less scammy than Web3 felt.
- cirgue 3y agoNever fear, we’ll get there
- exyi 3y agoExactly, the AI chatbots is the perfect technology for autoscamming people.
- graypegg 3y agoHey, you know… that’s a use case! Better than Web3’s common use case of… ? </sarcasm>
- _delirium 3y agoThere are definitely a bunch of outright scammers already operating in that space. A bunch of the “AI-powered” browser extensions are just malware, for example. https://www.pcmag.com/news/beware-ai-scams-meta-blocks-1000-plus-links-tied-to-chatgpt-themed-malware https://www.pcmag.com/news/beware-ai-scams-meta-blocks-1000-...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LinuxBender 3y agoI think scam is perhaps not quite right. I see AI as the evolution beyond social media algorithms. Now it will feel even more human resulting in the manipulation being even more subtle and effective over time. Being more human like may also help people feel like sharing more information with it. Some may even think it is their friend. I think there is a lot more psychology in play with AI whereas Web3 mostly plays on ones greed and facilitates wash trading and faux investments into unregistered unlicensed securities. So for AI I believe a better description could be manipulation framework.
- warent 3y agoComparing web3 scams to this new wave of AI is unironically ignorant and delusional. For one small example I literally get daily value from Copilot and happily pay for it, and there is much more beyond this. I've never once gotten meaningful value from web3.
- Version467 3y agoThat's not the point. Yes, there are many legit startups, exploring the very real value add that AI has to offer. But the people that previously sold scammy web3 stuff did move on to peddle scammy ai stuff.
- hackitup7 3y agoThese people migrated to AI because their goal is to get rich quick. Whether or not it's a scam is orthogonal. It's the same people got excited about metaverse, producing online courses, and weed startups. If they aren't in tech they're doing supplements and drop shipping. Unrelated, but I don't think AI is a scam.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoI don’t think Copilot and whatever fresh hell the popularised version of AI is are comparable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- favflam 3y agoThe only cash flows into the ecosystem have been from ICOs. The SEC is cracking down on such activities. Besides investment cash flow, I don't think there have been any revenue generating ventures that cater to customers outside the Web3 ecosystem. The true web3 players will be traditional finance companies upgrading their settlement systems. I am curious how people will answer your second question.
- Animats 3y ago> The true web3 players will be traditional finance companies upgrading their settlement systems. That happens in the US this month, but it has nothing to do with crypto. The Federal Reserve System is launching FedNow, a 24/7 instant settlement system which obsoletes middlemen such as Zelle, Paypal, and Venmo. This is like Pix in Brazil, SEPA in the EU, WePay in China, etc. - a fast payment system run by banks and settled through central banks. It's much like FedWire, but faster, cheaper, and for smaller amounts. You buy houses with FedWire; you buy dinner with FedNow. It's an inter-bank system, like Visa; you have to have an account with a bank to use it. Chase and Wells Fargo are on board, but Bank of America is not. This will bring the US up to date with the other countries that have national payment systems. Anybody in the US involved in moving money around needs to get up to speed on FedNow. Fast. [1] https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow
- photonerd 3y agoBased on my LinkedIn inbox… plenty of them still around & still hiring. They just seem to be less about what was original called “web3” and more about applying crypto to… stuff.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI also still get seemingly pointless pitches about crypto … businesses(?) looking for engineers. Not one have I read and thought hey that sounds like a real business plan
- photonerd 3y agoYeah, most of them are—at best—an interesting feature looking for a business
- muzani 3y agoWeb3 makes more sense than cryptocurrency IMO. Instead of applying all the computing power to printing and gatekeeping imaginary money, why not apply it to well, computing? Web hosting and running calculations is something of actual tangible value.
- Joeboy 3y agoI would imagine most people working for Web3 startups were doing it for the money, and are probably not too surprised that the gravy train hit the buffers eventually.
- 0xGod 3y agoThere are new ones being made every day. Web 3 is just getting started.
- flangola7 3y agoI've heard it's just getting started for years. When does it actually achieve something of practical importance?
- oblio 3y agoImmediately after cold fusion :-D
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago> The term "Web3" was coined in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood We’re eagerly waiting!
- asadotzler 3y ago10 years later is absolutely not "just getting started". We built Web 1 in 5 year and web 2 in 5 years, complete, with uncountable real businesses generating actual profits and user value. Web 3 has had far more time and far more money and people invested than Web 1 and 2 combines and has yet to demonstrate any real business or user value. What a joke. What a scam.
- Animats 3y agoSee Molly White's "Web 3 is Going Just Great"[1] She keeps a tally of all the scams. The total is now over $67 billion. [1] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
- schleck8 3y ago> in August 2021 they were exploited for an (at the time) record-setting $611 million. > Now, it's happened again, and some reports are throwing around even more massive numbers like $42 billion. In reality, the exploiters were able to mint massive quantities of tokens on multiple networks, with their wallet balances showing numbers in the billions. However, complete lack of liquidity for these tokens meant their "billions" are worth substantially less. > According to crypto research firm Beosin, the attackers have so far cashed out around 5,196 ETH (~$10.1 million) in liquid assets. Poly Network suspended services shortly after the attack. Unbelievable hahaha
- xk_id 3y ago[flagged]
- muzani 3y agoNearly all of these are blockchain/NFT stuff and not decentralised internet infrastructure. There's probably more money stolen from physical highway construction than Web3 infra.
- troupo 3y ago> Nearly all of these are blockchain/NFT stuff and not decentralised internet infrastructure. web3 is 100% blockchain/NFT stuff (aka scams and ponzi schemes) and 0% decentralised internet infrastructure. Also, internet infra is already decentralised.
- AirMax98 3y agoI was doing a lot of contract work a little over a year ago for about 3-4 different web3 clients. I’m back to working FT at a regular startup. The money isn’t there any more and that’s all that anyone who actually saw what was happening really cared about.
- Stevvo 3y agoIt's a cycle, I was in the last wave in 2018. At some point most developers would realise that chain-scaling issues would prevent profit. They either left to go work for FAANG, or transitioned to working directly on scaling. There are a multitude of grants and other funding from the Ethereum foundation, Gitcoin, DAOs, etc that facilitate a comfortable life for anyone who wants to work on these things. Nearly all Web3 startups are fully remote, so once the CTO leaves they just sort of collapse of their own accord. CEO is usually a loony.
- mattlondon 3y agoPivoted to LLM I expect.
- FreeHugs 3y agoAt the core of Web3 projects is the idea that one can own their identity via cryptographic proof. Over time, this concept will find its way into many projects. Especialy into open source projects which try to make the web a better place. For example, as soon as browsers support a DNS based on cryptographic proofs like ENS, other technologies which have URL based identities (like ActivityPub) will automatically support cryptographic identities. Which would bring it to projects like Mastodon and Bluesky automatically.
- nailer 3y agoStill around. Render looks good for the VFX industry as does Helium for broadening 5G reception. Homebase does tokenised real estate that trades immediately for close to nothing since it’s crypto. Lots of payments international payments companies obviously. Hacker News just generally doesn’t keep up to date because they think crypto is scams. That’s like thinking generative AI is deepfakes.
- bagels 3y agoThe perception isn't there for no reason. There is a lot of fraud, but also a lot of product with no market in the space.
- AirMax98 3y agoBe aware that Helium is for sure a massive scam. [0] [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2022/09/23/helium-crypto-tokens-peoples-network/?sh=552350997316 https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2022/09/23/helium-...
- can16358p 3y agoWeb3 is getting rid of stupid scams to keep its foundations solid. In the long run it will benefit everyone. However we're probably entering the bull season and we'll see a new wave of web3 scam startups soon nevertheless.
- austin-cheney 3y agoThe joke of it is that Web3 claims to be the answer to decentralization... but in every case of Web3 there is some reliance upon a block chain. If the block chain is limited to only the client and not on any server, therefore unnecessary and worthless, it would then be not centralized. I get the impression nobody takes the time to actually parse the word decentralization. It only means not centralized, but that applies to absolutely everything in the scheme. Somehow people get this confused and for whatever reason believe if anything is not fully centralized then all of it must be fully decentralized. In order to achieve actual decentralization with online or web technologies consider this incomplete checklist: * No DNS * No identity manager * No shared server. A server is fine so long as you are the only client that can access it as a server or other clients are currently known and prior authenticated (a peer). * No root certificate or certificate authority or CRL. * No blockchain * No shared database or other shared services Otherwise claims of decentralization are probably just scams to pilfer your data, steal your money, or mine crypto remotely using your hardware. Decentralization is still possible as I have proven it in a personal application of mine, but its very complicated and extremely different from how the web works.
- arilotter 3y ago> * No DNS DHT with either bootstrapping or literally just rip through every single IPv4 addr and see if it's a peer lol. > * No identity manager How do you know what your friends' phone numbers or emails are? Ask them. No centralized DB needed. > * No shared server. A server is fine so long as you are the only client that can access it as a server or other clients are currently known and prior authenticated (a peer). Ethereum (and many of its sibling/child evm chains) clients can run on a Raspberry Pi. It's really not that hard to run a node, and could be packaged into common usage easily. > * No root certificate or certificate authority or CRL. Yeah, this is the big one for sure that needs to be solved :) > * No blockchain What is wrong with a public distributed ledger? > * No shared database or other shared services Not sure what this applies to.
- austin-cheney 3y ago> What is wrong with a public distributed ledger? It is a highly centralized artifact, which is maximally self-defeating if the goal is not centralizing. When you actually achieve decentralization nobody else is storing or accessing your activity or hoarding your data. There are no public ledgers or anything to crawl or anything to screen scrape, because its on your hardware and you determine who can access it.
- arilotter 3y agoI work fulltime at a Web3 startup & have been for almost 5 years, and we're building a non-custodial smart contract wallet + everything else you need for web3 SDK & a trading card game using web3 tech. the b2b stuff is going great, tons and tons and tons of integrators and devs using our SDKs every day. the sentiment in the gaming world has always been pretty negative towards web3, so nothing feels different now ;) large multinational brands are dropping nft collabs often right now - adidas, tons of high fashion, etc. & many other other big brands are working on them behind closed doors i don't think it's going anywhere, and most people are just building out tech and infra
- rsynnott 3y agoOh, no, someone has opened a hole in the space time continuum to 2021! (Based on the Adidas thing, anyway)
- arilotter 3y agoI mean, here's a couple from only the last few days: Louis Vuitton - https://ca.louisvuitton.com/eng-ca/stories/louis-vuitton-via https://ca.louisvuitton.com/eng-ca/stories/louis-vuitton-via Nike X EA Sports - https://twitter.com/dotSWOOSH/status/1677088133559508993 https://twitter.com/dotSWOOSH/status/1677088133559508993 Mercedes Benz - https://twitter.com/MercedesBenzNXT/status/1663585720689205249 https://twitter.com/MercedesBenzNXT/status/16635857206892052... I don't doubt that most of the "NFT Drop" things are worthless money grabs, but my point is that the tech is still darling to tons of corpo execs, and so lots of people in the industry are still getting $$$ to make cool things :)
- rsynnott 3y agoAI (remember the period a few years back when everything was briefly a chatbot startup? Microsoft Tay era) -> blockchain -> web3 (blockchain renamed) -> metaverse -> AI (LLM era). It's the circle of hype... There'll be something else along shortly. (Some of the surviving web3 startups literally seem to have rebranded into LLM startups.)
- sushidev 3y agoI’d say that 95% or more is just scam. People like Sam Bankman Fried. They are all gone or dying now more or less. The strong and real businesses with profits and sustainable revenue models are still up and running. There are quite a few examples. Specifically in web3 (within the blockchain and crypto sphere): https://www.coinbase.com/web3/dapps/swappin-gifts https://www.coinbase.com/web3/dapps/swappin-gifts is a real world utility web3 dapp. Maybe the first and only one today..
- throwoutway 3y ago> Overall ranking#495 > Ranking in Swap#125 > No ratings Sounds like a random dapp to push... Are you the author or related to swapping-gifts?
- sushidev 3y agoI’m from this sphere. I checked a lot of dapps and when dapps even work, most of the time it’s either gambling, or something completely of no value in the real world. Therefore my comment.
- alphager 3y agoSwappin.gifts is a dApp that allows users to purchase from a selection of thousands of different gift cards using thousands of different crypto currencies over several blockchains. Built on web3, swappin.gifts acts as a new and transformative off-ramp solution. So it's a website that exchanges crypto tokens to overpriced gift cards. Why does this need web3? This could be 3 PHP files on a VPS.
- sushidev 3y agoWhy anything at all needs to be web3. You have to ask yourself this question. It’s quite a deep rabbit hole - you have to understand some economics and governance in macro in order to see the value. The other way to see the value is if you are unbanked - like a large percentage of the world. If you are in this group, then blockchain technology (and crypto) is a life changer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sshine 3y agoI joined a blockchain startup late 2021, moments before the crypto winter broke out. I left 15 months later, but they're still going, just did an alpha release. Because of my work being present on GitHub, I've been contacted by recruiters over email for similar positions several times this year. I went to two conferences on blockchain and zero-knowledge. Everyone at these conferences seem like serious people working for funded companies, and everyone seems to be okay with there being no customers. It's a little surreal. It seems that some of the early profit makers in the space are still sinking money into the hope of a future "after the crypto winter" bubble. There is a lot of zero-knowledge hype. Some of the startups that claim to use zero-knowledge cryptography simply aren't.
- pentagrama 3y agoWeb3 is related to NFTs? Because I feel that NFTs where the most mainstream hype that now is buried below the AI hype. Remember those monkeys?
- joemazerino 3y agoAnyone who has seen what happened to Multichain lately?
- webXishere 3y agoSome of these scamsters have moved to Web5 https://www.tbd.website/blog/tbd-web5-tech-preview https://www.tbd.website/blog/tbd-web5-tech-preview
- hunter12345 3y agostill bullish on crypto, space seems dead but serious folks are still building
- egorfine 3y agoWe're doing fine. We're in long-term, so scams and hype are something that we try to ignore as we build for practical use cases. But yes, the days of free venture money are over. These are now flowing in the direction of a different two-letter hype. Source: I am a founder of a web3 startup that has survived a couple of crypto winters.