Despite the recent fallout in the crypto industry and some of the negative connotations derived from speculations on non-fungible tokens (NFT), entrepreneurs and developers of the novel technology gathered last week at the Taipei Blockchain Week to share some of the practical use cases and what Web3 and blockchain can bring to the table for the future.
For the Web3 tech to really penetrate the Web2 space or to generate mass adoption among users who don't even know what blockchain is, it is important to make the products more Web2-friendly, and in some cases, companies might need to consider giving up certain elements of Web3 in order to provide better user experience, said Jonathan Mui, CEO of Moongate.
Moongate is the Web3 startup responsible for Taipei Blockchain Week's ticketing. Mui said the team burned midnight oil in order to strip down the complex process for attendees to access their NFT-gated ticket for the event. The NFT ticket was a simple QR code sent to attendee's inbox.
NFT-based ticketing and membership are the core business of Moongate. Mui said his team has been in talks with brands and businesses to help them build NFT-based membership without telling customers it's NFT. Mui said, "the underlying technology of NFT is so strong and powerful that in the future, people will just be using it without knowing."
The NFT-based membership is a paradigm-shifting tool that enables customers to actually own the membership. It is a transferrable token open for transaction whenever customers decide to sell the membership and the rewards stored in the membership to someone else. That way, the membership becomes an asset and customers are spending money in the store to grow the asset that is transactable. Ultimately, NFT-based membership could not only increase user engagement but also drive customer value, according to Mui.
For Web2 users to onboard Web3, the infrastructures needed have already been in place: emails and phone numbers. With these personal identification already integrated with people's lives, people will soon be using Web3 tech in everyday life without them even noticing.
Going forward, it is important for Moongate to iterate the product-building process while figuring out how to integrate the new tech with legacy systems so that it would require less steps and create less friction for Web2 users to get onboard.
Mui said, for example, when dealing with retail customers still using the POS system, Moongate needs to find a more realistic way to build the product, and sometimes they need to go back and adopt some of the Web2 approaches to make their product scalable and viable.
"As long as we are able to reap the benefits that matter using Web3, it does not always have to be fully decentralized," said Mui. Between Web2 and Web3 is a spectrum and Moongate is working towards from one end to the other end of the spectrum.
Being in the NFT industry and being grouped under the term of "NFT", startups like Moongate are inevitably facing skepticism from clients and from outside the industry, overshadowed by the speculations and scandals about NFTs and cryptos. Mui said most of Moongate's clients actually require them not to put NFT wordings on their product.
But Mui and other Web3 entrepreneurs remain optimistic. "It's exciting to build a sustainable business on the technology," Mui said, "We are at the cusp of something really close to a massive adoption of NFTs and these are the real use case of NFT and blockchain, so I think we are lucky to be able to generate revenue without needing to rely on speculation."
Moongate CEO Jonathan Mui. Credit: Jonathan Mui
