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The market-leading blockchain company Consensys, which was established by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, has published a special report, Opportunities in Web3, in partnership with Entrepreneur Middle East and Lucidity Insights .

The report explores Web3's origin story, what makes Web3 the revolutionary gamechanger that it is touted to be, and the top 10 trends of Web3 in 2023. After all, while Web3 is something that everyone seems to be aware of and many are talking about, only a few people truly understand the extent of its implications.

Image courtesy Lucidity Insights.

Web3 is being hailed as "the future of the internet," and the next big technological revolution. It is also 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 1990s 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.

Image courtesy Lucidity Insights.

As the visionary Joseph Lubin, 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, products monetized by social media companies; we are active builders. Whether it's creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs), building collections of them, developing decentralized applications (dApps), participating in decentralized asset organizations (DAOs), shaping policies, or designing protocols, we all contribute as builders to the next generation of the Web."

Though it 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 1990s. 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.

Image courtesy Lucidity Insights.

The Opportunities in Web3 report thus 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 DAOs. In addition, the report covers some of the most exciting and gamechanging Web3 startups and projects, while also reviewing various governments' adoption of blockchain and Web3, as well as the global trends in regulating this new industry.

The special report also covers central bank digital currencies (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 that among the 80 countries that were analyzed, 57 legalized cryptocurrencies, while 14 have partial bans, and nine -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 by clicking here.

This article was originally published on Lucidity Insights, a partner of Entrepreneur Middle East in developing special reports on the Middle East and Africa's tech and entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Related: A New Frontier: Lessons Learnt From Exploring NFTs, The Metaverse, And More

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