Move over Web3, Web5 is building the Internet's future
Jack Dorsey's 'TBH' laid out an ambitious roadmap this week, for how the future of the Internet will look like, with a tongue-in-cheek project name.
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Happy weekend everyone?
It’s not a wild stretch by any means to say that Jack Dorsey is one of the most accomplished entrepreneurs of the 21st century.
Having co-founded Twitter, and led it as its CEO since 2006, Jack has revolutionised not just communication over the Internet, by helping shape and build the Internet’s digital Town-Square, but also revolutionised payments and e-commerce for small businesses in America with Square, which he co-founded and has been CEO of since 2009.
Combined, both Twitter & Square have a market cap of more than $100 Billion; and have touched upon more than 500M users, so when it comes to building industry disruptive organisations, Jack knows what he’s doing.
An outspoken believer of Bitcoin, and an equally public critic of the larger Crypto industry or as some might call it ‘Web3’, Jack has some pretty strong takes on how a decentralised future of the Internet is essential, and has often publicly lamented on his failure to build out that future in the initial years of Twitter.
One to practice what he preaches, he also stepped down as the CEO of Twitter earlier this year, and in case you have been living under a rock ever since, you would know that the new guy in charge- Parag Agarwal has had a tricky time to say the least with Elon Musk launching a controversial takeover of the social media giant.
In the midst of all this controversy, apart from trolling the Web3 industry with his tweets, and taking regular shots at Venture Capitalists promoting their Crypto projects, it seems as if Jack was hard at work actually building out the decentralised version of the Internet that he always imagined.
As part of one of the companies he leads called ‘TBD’ (for lack of a better word), Jack and his team dropped the vision of what this future, built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain looks like- titled ‘Web 5’.
Why Web 5?
The project claims to be the ‘Extra-Decentralised’ version of the Internet, and is apparently merging the best practices of Web 2 and Web 3, and since 2+3= 5, it’s called Web 5
Because why not? 🤷♂️
So where exactly does music fit in Jack’s new ‘Web5’ vision?
It’s no secret that Jack has always been a massive music fan.
Back in November we wrote a piece on how the music streaming app ‘Tidal’ founded by Hip-Hop mogul Jay-Z in 2015, which was acquired by Square for $300M , was launching ‘Fan Centred Royalties’.
Jay Z and Jack have always been close, and recently even announced their plans to launch a financial literacy program for the residents of the Marcy Houses, a public housing complex in Brooklyn, New York, where Jay-Z grew up.
As one of the use cases outlined on the website, users can store their personal music collection in ‘Decentralised Web Nodes’, which cannot be controlled by any centralised company like Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube.
But why would you care about that?
Imagine you create a playlist of your favourite songs painstakingly over the years on Spotify, and want to now switch over to Apple or YouTube Music.
Unless you want to spend hours manually re-creating all of it again, Spotify does not allow a feature that lets you export your data, and can even take all of it away from you, or ban your account just because the that’s how the data laws work.
Our take on this?
What we at Incentify are building, is solving for the same problems around music sharing between multiple streaming platforms, and discovery via a community with similar tastes, rather than mechanical algorithms.
Sign up for Early Access on our website, if you’re interested in what we are building, or simply DM us on Instagram or Twitter to know more!
While it’s still early stages for Web5, it’ll be interesting to see how it shapes out, and whether it manages to gain large scale adoption.
Because for all that Jack might troll Web3 and cryptocurrencies apart from Bitcoin, it has still attracted Billions of dollars of capital, onboarded millions of users into using its protocols and thousands of developers building projects on top of it.
For what it’s worth, it still feels like a simulation when Billionaire founders are building projects and naming them based off Twitter exchanges.
“The most entertaining outcome is the most likely”
Have a good weekend everyone 🍻
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