As the race As enterprise adoption of web3 accelerates, some people believe that this is not a one-sided growth, but a journey where both mainstream institutions and cryptocurrency startups can bring new opportunities.
“The signs we’re seeing now is that innovation is coming more from companies,” said Gagan Mak, chief product officer and senior director of Web 3 services at Circle, in a panel discussion at the Avalanche House event in Seoul, South Korea.
For example, Nike and Starbucks launched their own NFT-related services: a marketplace and a loyalty program, respectively. “The value of NFTs may be low, but everyone who has minted a Starbucks NFT with the Odyssey program, they’re all positive, and the value of their NFTs has increased,” Mack said.
This market is still nascent, said Dan Sun, director of startup success for web3 APAC at Google Cloud. “We saw the value we could bring to new emerging markets and what kind of stance we had to take,” he said. “So we’re still discussing, we’re still learning, we’re still seeing the values we can deliver.”
Lowering the barrier to entry can be as simple as fixing terminology to make the technology and web3 elements more accessible. This is something we've seen happen with big brand companies entering this space; They use terms like "digital" or "virtual" instead of calling it web3 or metaverse.
But what about startups? “I think both sides have opportunities,” said Lihan Li, co-CEO and founder of web3 data intelligence platform Xangle.