Big Tech makes moves on crypto

The Future. Twitter, Facebook, and Google are all making plays in the web3 space. From creating dedicated teams to building integrative features, a bonafide web3 war seems to be brewing. Although the crypto market has seen a rocky start to 2022, this flurry of activity signals strong belief from tech’s biggest players that the web3 movement is here to stay.

Big Tech knocking
Big Tech is diving headfirst into web3.

• Twitter most recently implemented profile picture verification for Twitter Blue users, allowing NFT owners to link their crypto wallets to verify ownership.
• Meta is reportedly working on a feature that will allow NFT owners to display their art on their social media; it’s also working on helping users mint their own NFTs.
• Google announced the formation of its blockchain unit, dedicated to “blockchain and other next-gen distributed computing and data storage technologies.”

Centralized decentralization
These recent moves affirm that the web3 movement is steadily shifting from a niche movement to the mainstream. Massive corporations are investing time and resources into creating infrastructure, from marketplaces to mechanisms for social signaling.

But at the same time, this should be ringing alarm bells for the web3 community, which is presumably built on the premise of decentralization. The involvement of these third-party platforms is, in many ways, the very thing that web3 is working to remove.