Why we are going 100% into web3

We decided to team up and start a new venture in the wonderful world of web3.

For the past few months, we fell down the rabbit hole, and what we saw behind all the speculation, Ponzi schemes, scams, privacy issues, pollution, and all the other things that web3 is criticized for, are incredible opportunities to build a better web.

web3 makes us feel excited about the tech ecosystem again, after long years of a landscape dominated by SaaS products and pretty much only SaaS products. We're a bit guilty of that as we've built a few SaaS products ourselves but still found this dominance a bit depressing and felt it was time for a change.

Fortunately, thanks to web3 and its promise of total decentralization, we now feel the same magic that we felt in the nineties when we discovered the web and companies like Netscape, Yahoo, Google, GeoCities, or ICQ. Everything was pretty much imperfect (if not broken) but you could feel that there were many opportunities to build cool things.

We're also excited by the fact that web3 is a real threat to the monopolies of some tech giants that made billions by using and selling our personal data, while we got nothing. A web controlled by half a dozen companies is not the web we fell in love with in the nineties. That’s the most important thing we want to fight against.

That said, we want to insist on the fact that we're not part of the group of those who think web3 will solve all the problems of the world. Still, there are definitely some things we can't fix with our current way of doing things, and that can only be fixed by a paradigm shift.

And yes, web3 is still very imperfect. Going on web3isgoinggreat.com is part of our morning routine, we’ve watched Dan Olson’s video, we’ve read Moxie Marlinspike’s article, and we know it still 95% sucks (if not 99%). But we also know that something revolutionary is not immediately better than the incumbent thing. It has the potential to become 10x or 100x better but at the present moment, it’s bad. That’s the way it works. And if in a decade we end up with something that’s only 20% better than the current thing, it was worth it.

So what will we do exactly? Well, we’ll start a studio solely focused on web3, inspired by concepts like the hyper freelance model by Ben Issen and the small bets approach by Daniel Vassallo. That means we'll do consulting and education projects while experimenting with our own (small) products. This is our favorite model because it allows us to build real stuff very quickly and work with many different people in the field. We're calling our new venture 0x3 Studio, 0x3 being the hexadecimal for the number 3. We chose that name because we're focused on web3 but also because we're a founding team of 3.

The very first thing that we'll release is yet another NFT collection called JellyBots. However, unlike most NFTs collections that serve no purpose except to enrich their creators, ours will have a real utility: it will give access to all 0x3 Studio products, some kind of lifetime access license to everything that we're building and that sits in your wallet. The best part is that it will be extremely affordable if you are early, but more on that later. Stay tuned to our blog and our Twitter because the mint date will be announced very soon.

Speaking of staying tuned, our first product unlockable with a JellyBot is called Hotmint and it will give you a live dashboard of all the NFT collections currently minting with an associated score (out of 100), so you won't be late on a mint ever again, and you'll definitely know what you want to mint and what you want to avoid. It will be available very soon, probably in October.

The second product we want to build after Hotmint, and that will also be unlockable with a JellyBot, is a headless and decentralized content publishing platform on top of Arweave. You can see it as a mix between Twitter and WordPress but with real ownership of your content and without the fear of forever losing it for some reason. We use the code name Solid to qualify this project for now but we don't know yet if it will stick.

Depending on demand, another thing we want to do next is 0x3 Academy, a collection of video tutorials to learn about web3, whether for non-technical or technical people. We want to do it in multiple languages, starting with English and French. Obviously, you will simply need to own a JellyBot to access these tutorials, but you got it by now, didn't you?

OK, that looks amazing, but what if web3 is not the future? “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” This quote wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln has always been a favorite of ours. It encourages you to be an actor, not a spectator. And gives the hope that yes, you can have an impact. But you obviously can’t have an impact as big as turning the web on its own head by playing alone, so we believe web3 will be the future if enough people decide it will be the future. And in our opinion, we’re far past the point of no return already.