Who Says Web3 Is Only For Crypto Bro Hiding In Dark Forums?

This casual popular science piece demystifies the down-to-earth daily use cases of Web3 technology that fit right into normal people’s regular routines without fancy jargon or overhyped wealth myths.

For most people who only catch snippets of Web3 content from short video platforms or gossip forums, the entire sector is easily tied to volatile trading, overnight fortune myths, and obscure technical terms that do not make any sense in daily life. That stereotype is so deeply rooted that a large group of regular people will automatically filter out any content tagged with Web3, assuming it is something far away from their 9-to-5 work, weekend hangout plans and grocery runs. The fact is, however, you may have already interacted with Web3 products multiple times in the past three months without even realizing you are using a technology built on decentralized public ledger systems.

Take the limited-edition digital souvenir tickets for your favorite indie band’s last tour as a simple example. Unlike the old virtual tickets stored on a single centralized platform server that can be faked by scammers or deleted by system glitches, these tickets are minted on a public chain where every transaction and ownership change is recorded permanently and can not be altered by any third party. If you can not make it to the show at the last minute, you can resell the souvenir ticket to another fan directly on a peer-to-peer exchange, and the embedded smart contract will automatically send 10 percent of the resale price to the band’s wallet as a copyright bonus, no large ticketing platform will take a 30 percent cut from the transaction as it used to do for traditional physical ticket resales.

Another super common Web3 use case that fits into ordinary people’s daily hobbies is the decentralized outdoor activity record system adopted by hundreds of local hiking communities across the world. Previously, if you posted your 300-day hiking track record on a certain social media platform, you risk losing all your archived content if the platform shuts down, bans your account by mistake or changes its content storage rule to delete old posts that are not profitable for the algorithm. With a Web3-based record system, all your GPS tracks, hiking photos and badge collections are encrypted and stored across hundreds of independent nodes, no single organization can erase your years of effort, and you can use the same decentralized identity profile to sign up for events held by different hiking groups without registering for 10 separate accounts on different group management platforms.

Many small local neighborhood businesses, from independent cafes to secondhand bookstores, have also rolled out Web3-powered membership reward systems in recent years to get rid of the limitations of traditional centralized point systems. Under the old point system, the points you accumulated by buying 20 cups of latte would expire at the end of the year, and the store owner could not pass those points to a nearby handmade jewelry shop to create a cross-store discount promotion, because the point data was locked in the store’s private management system. The new Web3 reward points do not have an expiry date, can be transferred to your friends as a small gift, and can be accepted by all the partnering small businesses in the neighborhood circle without extra complicated system integration work, bringing far more flexibility for both store owners and regular customers.

There is no requirement for regular users to learn the complicated cryptographic knowledge behind blockchain or invest a large sum of money to get access to Web3 services. All the technical complexity has been hidden behind user-friendly frontends just like how most people do not need to understand the underlying mechanism of TCP/IP protocols to browse the internet or send messages on social media. You do not need to hold any crypto assets to use most of these practical everyday Web3 products, you only need to follow the normal login steps you are already familiar with, and the whole decentralized system will run smoothly on the backend without drawing any extra attention from you.

It is time to throw away the old stereotype that Web3 is a niche playground reserved for a small group of tech insiders or speculative traders. The core value of Web3 is not creating new speculative bubbles, but giving ordinary users more control over their own digital data, digital collectibles and reward assets that they earn through hard work. As more and more traditional industries integrate Web3 functions into their existing daily services, you will find more and more small convenient changes popping up in your daily life, making your digital experience safer, more transparent and more personalized than ever before.