<aside> 💡 Reading the articles below will be key to understanding the significance of crypto.
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Crypto brings about new way of funding projects and "companies". In a world with so many blockchains and hundreds of crypto tokens built on top of them, entire industries are automated through software, venture capital and stock markets are circumvented, entrepreneurship is streamlined and networks gain sovereignty through their own digital currency. This is the next phase of the internet.
"In this new world there are no companies, just protocols."
For the first time, open-source project founders can directly monetize their open-source network. Historically, successful open-source projects like BitTorrent or the Tor network were not directly monetized at the protocol level. Now, the founder of a decentralized file storage network can issue blockchain-based tokens that represent ownership in the network.
In addition to rewarding founders, these crypto tokens allow participants in networks to actually own a piece of the network, and even participate in governance decision making. This network equity ownership is unprecedented. Consider how many networks the modern western internet user is a part of — Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Uber, Airbnb, eBay, Instagram — the list goes on. In each of these cases, the network’s value is created by the users, but the value each individual user generates goes to the owners of the network. In this new blockchain-based model, that value is actually given back to the users of the network, proportional to their contribution.
What this means is that what ultimately disrupts many of the major web services created in the last decade could be peer-to-peer protocols, not companies. This would be similar to the effect that the torrent protocol had on media companies, but on a much larger scale.