Top 10 Trends of Web3 in 2023

Lucidity Insights’ recently published a Special Report titled “Opportunities in Web3”, which was published in partnership with Entrepreneur Middle East and market-leading blockchain company Consensys, which was established by Ethereum Co-founder, Joseph Lubin.  

Web3 is something that everyone seems to be aware of and many are talking about, but few people truly understand the extent of its implications. Web3 is hailed as the ‘future of the internet’ and the next big technological revolution. The Special Report explores Web3’s origin story, what makes Web3 the revolutionary game-changer that it is touted to be, and the top 10 trends of Web3 in 2023.  

Web3 is being described as the great new frontier in the internet landscape, where pioneers tap into their quest for freedom and autonomy, empowered by cutting-edge technology and some serious coding chops. This next wave of the digital revolution is all about decentralization, and moving away from the top-down command and control principles that we’ve largely built society on, to date.  

Many of the core concepts surrounding Web3 such as decentralization, openness, and greater user-utility, were introduced in the 1990’s as the World Wide Web came into being; but it wasn’t until the advent of blockchain technology in 2008 that Web3, as we now know it, began its formulation. 2022 is largely heralded as the year Web3 had its coming of age, where this ‘decentralized web’ was garnering significant mainstream adoption and truly introducing a technological paradigm shift for our global digital economy. 

As the visionary Joseph Lubin, the Co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Consensys, puts it, “Web3 empowers communities with economic, social and political agency. While enabling individuals to exercise self-sovereignty. In web3, we are not just passive consumers – or worse, we are products monetized by social media companies; we are active builders. Whether it’s creating NFTs, building collections of them, developing dApps, participating in DAOs, shaping policies, or designing protocols – we all contribute as builders to the next generation of the web.” 

Infographic: The Evolution from Web 1.0 to Web3

Though Web3 may sound like it’s still in its nascent stages, the speed of crypto, blockchain and web3 adoption is nearly 2.5x faster than the speed at which the internet was first adopted in the 1990’s. It is conservatively estimated that there are over 420 million crypto users worldwide as of the beginning of 2023, meaning that there is a 4.2% global crypto ownership rate. Many forecast that there will be 3.7 billion crypto users by 2030. 

Infographic: Technology Adoption Curve - Log Scale - Web3 2030 Forecast vs Early Internet 

In this Special Report, Lucidity Insights covers the Top 10 Trends in Web3 today, including how real gamers are being brought into Web3, how NFTs are becoming utility-focused, the revival of decentralized exchanges, the impact of Artificial Intelligence on Blockchain, the increased tokenization of real-world assets, and the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). The report also covers some of the most exciting and game-changing Web3 startups and projects, reviews government adoption of blockchain and web3, and global trends in regulating this new industry.

The Special Report also covers Central Bank Digital Currencies, also known as CBDCs – something making waves across the world. It also covers the legalization of cryptocurrencies and different approaches countries are taking towards digital currencies. The good news is, among 80 countries that were analyzed, 57 legalized cryptocurrencies, while 14 have partial bans, and 9 – including China – have general bans. But legalization and regulation are not the only challenges the Web3 industry faces. From scalability limitations, to a lack of interoperability, user experience concerns, and some privacy and security issues, the industry is working hard to promote education and mainstream adoption.  

To read more about the future of web3, the decentralized web – read the full report here.