Web 3.0 Giving Us a Chance to Live Our Childhood Dreams
Possibilities for creators
GM, I’m Shreya 👋
And this is Crypto Creatives. Every Thursday, you get one of the following:
Opportunities for creators in Web3
News about the Web3 Creator Economy
If you’re excited to be a part of the upgraded Creator Economy, welcome home!
I wanted to become an astronaut when I was a kid.
But I didn’t enjoy maths or physics in school.
While studying visual communication as my undergrad, I developed a deep interest in different visual art forms. I loved painting and creating textures with all sorts of materials.
Being an artist was the only way to explore my interest in the art industry.
That’s when reality hit me!
Like any other kid in my batch, I chose graphic design as my major because it promised a high-paying job.
When responsibilities and real life come in front of us, most of us choose stability over our dreams.
A steady paycheque becomes more lucrative than following our passion.
With the expansion of the creator economy, more people are going after their dreams, but a lot still struggle to make ends meet.
Things started to look different when Web 3.0 became mainstream. It’s giving people another chance to live their childhood dreams.
Web 3.0 Has Endless Opportunities
When people hear Web 3.0, they think of the metaverse. Quite similar to how blockchain meant bitcoin for most.
I was no different, but working in a tech company showed me the whole spectrum of new technology.
Other than the metaverse, Web 3.0 has Smart Contracts, aka NFT. There’s Tokenisation that makes it secure and easily transferable. There are DAOs help create a new consensus for a community.
Web 3.0 is more community-driven and brings freedom to everyone whose a part of the community.
It enables us to live our childhood dreams.
If you’re wondering how to let me tell you the following examples:
Work Is Play
When we were kids, all my friends were hooked to video games. All they wanted to do was play games all day, but it wasn’t possible.
When we moved to senior high, everyone got busy deciding the right career for themselves and forgot all about games and fun.
We’re forced to study subjects we were not interested in and prepare for exams that didn’t help us grow.
If we were in the same phase today, I doubt we would have left gaming entirely and prepared for engineering entrance exams. Instead, with Web 3.0, people live their dreams of making money by play-and-earn.
In fact, there was a 300% increase in “play-to-earn crypto games” in July 2021.
People who make fun of games and gamers have no idea what’s happening in the Philippines, where one of the most popular crypto games, Axie Infinity, has employed millions of people.
I wonder if my gamer friends and I would have followed the same career trajectory if we had the option to play-and-earn. It’s not too late, anyway.
Nobody wanted to learn coding, writing, or digital marketing, as today’s teenagers as today’s generation just wanted to let play a game all day; nobody even thought that.
Axie Infinity has now crossed $3.6Bn on their in-house marketplace trading and has over 2.8 million daily active players.
Work is play in Web 3.0Creating Art
I learned about different paintings and artists when I got into design college. That made me want to try different mediums and study them.
I always wanted to live like a hippie, free-spirited; I guess I had it in me way before I got into art and design.
Being an artist is the best way to explore my creativity and live freely.
But as a responsible adult with a family to care for and no generational wealth to sustain the artistic passion. I had to go with what promised a secure future. So instead of getting deeper into art, I moved to graphic design and marketing design.
All this while, I kept an art journal and tried to paint and create whenever I got time.
Last year when I learned about NFTs, I felt like I was given a second chance to follow my artistic dreams. Being an artist has never been this lucrative.
Being an artist has never been this lucrative.
People have been making fun of artists for generations — calling them names and making Starving Artists a socially acceptable phrase. However, NFT changed the narrative entirely.
Ever since Beeple sold his art for $69 Million and became a poster boy for tokenized art, NFT got into everyone’s radar.
People who’ve left their full-time jobs in tech to become NFT artists. Most artists made more money in weeks than they ever did.
It’s perhaps the BEST thing that happened to artists.
There are no Starving Artists in Web 3.0Community of Like-minded People
Working in my first real job, I learned that not everyone is as cool as I thought they would be.
People in my first company would just come to the office, do their job, and leave. There was no sense of community whatsoever. Working with 10–15 people, I felt alone and not understood.
Finding the right community where people understand who you are and what you do is influential.
I didn’t understand its real power until I joined the NFT community on Twitter. I met some of my coolest friends there and learned that finding people who are just like you is possible.
The Web 3.0 community does not just allow you to be yourself and collect your work, but they also provide constant support and eventually becomes your friends and a tribe.
There’s nothing you can do on Web 3.0 without building a community. This community is unlike the one we see on Facebook Groups, where people keep dropping their links, hoping to make a sale.
These communities make business happen; they create consensus through DAOs and create governance.
They decide what stays on the protocol and what leaves. They hype a new NFT project. They make and break artists.
It can’t be done without taking an active stake in the community.
The currency of Web 3.0 is community.Metaverse: Expanding our Imaginations
God, I have been a huge fan of fantasy.
The only way I was connected through fantasy was through Harry Potter and other fictional stories.
I so wanted to be the Charlie in my very own chocolate factory, but I accepted the reality and let it go.
Watching Ready Player One showed me a world that I assumed was impossible a few years back. Little did I know how soon I would get to live a similar world, a little less evolved clearly.
The thought of being a part of a fancy world was dreamy. Jumping from one building to another was meant for superheroes. However, with the metaverse, we’re given a chance to extend our imaginations.
We can now drive in the sky, look like Greek mythological creatures and wear costumes that look like Hindu deities.
Every artist and creator in the metaverse is living his imagination, and that’s the very part about Web 3.0.
The Metaverse is our imagination manifestedNobody Needs To Know
When I started writing on Quora, I was tired of seeing people from prestigious universities (read IITs, IIMs) writing about every topic on earth and garnering millions of views.
The tag and the face value were enough for them to succeed on the platform.
Everywhere you go, people would bombard you with personal pictures and pedigrees they’ve gathered over the years.
Even as a kid, I never wanted to be famous. I was an introvert, trying to hide from the crowd as much as possible.
Applying for a job or becoming an influencer without your image back then might not have been possible, but with Web 3.0, you get to be anonymous.
Nobody cares if you are an old dude working at Mcdonald’s or a white-collar employee at Wall Street.
Nobody cares about your professionally clicked DP; they care about which community you belong to and how much you contribute to the network.
Web 3.0 allows us to choose anonymity in an overly shared world of social media. The power of anonymity is humongous, and easier to find people from the same community.
We don't need to show who we are in Web 3.0Parting Thoughts
I had to let go of my childhood dreams when I learned how difficult it is to make a living by following them.
Understanding the technology and its use cases gives hope to artists and creators like me.
The best part, we’re only getting started.
Web 3.0 is giving us all a chance to live our childhood again.
Love this. So optimistic! I call this era The Age of Imagination.