Preface

It was 2019 and my husband and I were badly delayed in the Geneva airport, when a screen caught my attention. I looked up blearily from the box of Kambly biscuits in my crumb-covered lap to confirm that it wasn't a trick of the eye. It wasn't. Prominently displayed on airport monitors was the word "Ethereum," accompanied by its price chart.

We had both started contributing to the Ethereum Project when only a small group of people were aware of it. My job as a marketer was to share Ethereum with the world, and now here it was, considered important enough by the Geneva airport's administrators to deserve a place alongside Bitcoin and the top global stocks. Every marketer dreams of the day when a project they've taken from obscurity "goes mainstream." Excited, I leapt up to snap a photo, showering the carpet with chocolatey bits. This was one of many moments, starting in 2017 and continuing to the present, that would add to my conviction that our movement-building the decentralized third generation of the web-had arrived, and that it was here to stay.

In 2016, when I began doing the work that an editor from Wiley would eventually call Web3 marketing, almost no one had heard of Web3. We barely used the term ourselves. I certainly had no idea that as ConsenSys's chief marketing officer, working under a mandate to bring Ethereum to market, I would become the first Web3 marketer, hire and train the first Web3 marketing team, and bring to market many of the key products underlying Web3. At the time, we were a global network of nerds with a penchant for the esoteric. The nascent industry in which we worked was called crypto. An ether token cost a few dollars, and nobody owned any NFTs. Considering our modest beginnings, our ambitions were laughably grand. We had full conviction that Ethereum would become not only the next great computing platform, but a new foundation for the global financial system, the substrate for building an adjacent economy governed fairly and transparently by code. The offices where we worked practically glowed with expectation.

The future we envisioned back then-one in which millions of people would safeguard their own assets in user-controlled wallets, benefit from using web applications without becoming the real product being sold, and get paid to create ownable pieces of internet property-is becoming a reality. Admittedly, the process has been slower than many of us expected. Nonetheless, crypto is in the news on a daily basis now, and the leading user-controlled wallet, MetaMask, has 21 million monthly active users. There are 28.6 million crypto wallets that hold pieces of internet property known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).1 Meanwhile Ethereum has grown a nearly $200 billion market capitalization, second only to Bitcoin with its near $400 billion.2 According to estimates, over 200,000 software developers have learned Solidity, the main language for programming applications on the Ethereum blockchain.3 And in 2021, Ethereum's $11.6 trillion transaction volume surpassed even the traditional payments giant Visa, with $10.4 trillion.4 That's a lot of money, and a huge number of people who know about and use Ethereum, considering we started from zero.

If this sounds impressive, though, let us put it into perspective. Ethereum may have transferred more assets by value, but the 1 million transactions per day on Ethereum are no match for the Visa network, which processes over 150 million.5 The total market cap of all cryptocurrencies, which has at times exceeded $1 trillion, pales in comparison to the total US gross domestic product (GDP) of about $25 trillion, or the global GDP of more than $96 trillion.6 Of the total number of the estimated 31 million software developers in the world, fewer than 1% are familiar with Solidity.7 And it's important to keep in mind that 37% of the global population hasn't used the internet, let alone collected NFTs.8 Undeniably, our movement still has a long way to go.

We called it crypto-short for cryptocurrency-at the beginning, because its first applications were financial. Bitcoin was the first successful digital money system built on a decentralized blockchain. Many of the early applications on Ethereum had to do with financial value. Between 2012 and 2019, most of the value coming into the crypto ecosystem arrived through exchanges, superhighways like Coinbase where people could trade in their fiat currencies like dollars for investments in bitcoin or ether.9 Not only the money, but the people working in the industry came from technology and finance backgrounds.

Our nascent industry's parents were finance and technology, but starting in 2020 with the rise of NFTs, that changed. The crypto industry began intersecting with the arts, entertainment, fashion, and media. This brought an entirely new wave of personalities into our space, from creators to entrepreneurs and professionals, who reshaped its character. Suddenly, the audience downloading MetaMask included buyers of digital handbags for their avatars to wear in the metaverse, people who wanted to support their favorite artists, and gamers hoping to earn in-game assets. No longer was our industry purely about money; "cryptocurrency" interested only a subset of users.

It was only natural that the community began elevating the less-used but long-existing term Web3 to describe a holistic technology movement with broad cultural as well as financial implications. The movement has its own particular values: one is that people should be autonomous and resilient, taking personal responsibility for the decisions they make on the web, safeguarding their own value rather than depending on corporations; another is that the systems for governing the web should be open and transparent, applying the same set of rules fairly to all participants. Some of these values are derived from the origins of the web. Others are still being shaped by newcomers to Web3. These are the next 100 million users, and they come from absolutely everywhere.

Web3 swept beyond finance and technology, and today, it's poised to intersect every industry. Similar to how every industry was affected by digitization, each will need to adapt to Web3. But the computer scientists and economics professors who got us here, to this level of crypto adoption and the starting line of Web3, won't get us there, to the next 100 million "mainstream" users. They will be joined by professionals leading Web3 teams inside their organizations, creative entrepreneurs and artists who understand how to engage with Web2 retail consumers, and investors who can read not only open source code on Github and academic whitepapers but also intricacies of human behavior. Far beyond a screen in the Geneva airport, this technology is truly on the verge of mass adoption. The people, projects, and companies that catalyze this next wave of adoption can expect vast rewards-and they won't all be engineers. There is a path for the brightest nontechnical marketing and business minds to lead with them.

My objective in writing this book is to empower fellow marketers to start building in Web3. I use the term marketer very loosely throughout to describe those who, like me, love telling stories and putting ourselves in other people's shoes, who care about how the things we create look and feel. We are businesspeople and strategists, artists and designers, community leaders and educators. As our movement touches wider audiences and more diverse industries, I believe minds like ours have a crucial role to play driving the next wave of Web3 adoption. To date, there exist few high-quality educational materials on Web3 for non-engineer readers. This is a shame because it deters some of the sharpest thinkers and most experienced professionals from entering the space.

In this book, I attempt to explain Web3 in the clearest way possible to anyone familiar with the internet. The most important point to understand about Web3 is that it's not a predetermined set of outcomes, but rather a substrate, a clay we can mold in our hands. Like an artist learning a new medium, we must understand our materials thoroughly before we can begin creating with them. For this reason, I spend the first third of the book tracing the history of how Web3 emerged from its origins in Web1 and Web2, showing that Web3 isn't a new set of ideas, but rather a novel realization of the original vision for the web. Then, I explain its key properties, the ones the readers of this book can use to mold their own Web3 systems. These include tokens, NFTs, decentralized applications (dapps), decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and Web3-enabled metaverse worlds.

Nearly halfway through this book readers will encounter the first sections explicitly about marketing. These benefit from insights I've gleaned from reading numerous texts on marketing, and I cite many of my favorites throughout. No prior familiarity with marketing concepts is required to understand them, especially because many of my recommendations cut against the grain of traditional marketing wisdom. The marketing-focused chapters mostly detail the best practices and learnings my teammates and I have gathered over seven years as the first Web3 marketing team, first focused on Ethereum at ConsenSys, and now at Serotonin, the marketing agency and product studio I founded...