According to Netscape founder, Web3 is akin to early internet's growth
According to Netscape's founder,
Marc Andreessen, a billionaire software entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, compares Web3 and its core blockchain technology to the early internet's emergence.
Andreessen, who is now best known as the co-founder of the blockchain-focused VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), rose to prominence by creating Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, and then founding Netscape Navigator, which ruled the browser industry for much of the 1990s.
Andreessen, who featured on the Bankless podcast with his investing partner and colleague Chris Dixon, compared the growing acceptability and bustle of activity in Web3 to the frenzy of work that marked his early years in technology.
Andreessen stressed that he would never make such a sweeping statement in the heat of the moment and that it was the first time he'd ever said it: "This is the first and only time I've ever said [Web3] is similar to the internet. If you go back over all of my previous statements, you'd think that with my knowledge, I'd have said it at least 48 times. This is the first time I've used an analogy like this."
"I've never stated something like this about any other type of technology because I just wanted everyone to know that I'm serious about the analogy."
While many crypto supporters have drawn parallels between the adoption of blockchain technology and the early internet (much to the chagrin of crypto opponents), Andreessen's first-hand experience lends him unique authority to make such assertions.
He went on to say that the current Web3 environment is attracting the world's brightest minds: "The simplest way to think about it is that when you get something like this that has a force behind it, that seems to have this type of collective impact and is pulling many of the world's smartest people to work on it, the arguments fundamentally play out differently than the folks think."
Web3 is the "missing" link for the internet, according to Andreessen, adding confidence, sovereignty, and financial viability to the ecosystem:
a16z, which is most known for its early investments in Instagram and Slack, first joined the crypto industry in 2013 with an investment in an exchange platform and has subsequently invested in a number of major cryptocurrency-related businesses. It announced the establishment of its fourth cryptocurrency fund, valued at $4.5 billion, increasing Andreessen Horowitz's total investment in crypto firms to a little over $7.6 billion.
Andressen wrapped up the conversation with a short explanation of why a16z is investing so heavily in the industry: "We might see the entire world economy functioning on blockchain in 30 or 50 years."
