What happened to Web 3.0

I was just sitting here enjoying a beautiful Melbourne day. Clear, sunny skies but with the chill of winter on our doorstep. I was looking back over my notes from a year or so back and looking at those blockchain books gathering dust on my shelf. Web 3.0 was the hot topic 18 months ago when I first entered start up land with Pathways. But as I sit here today, I haven't heard of Web 3.0 for months now AI is the new cool kid on the block!!! Is it just my perception or is there something larger here at work?

Clearly the rapid rise of AI must be a significant factor in Web 3.0 taking a back seat but is there more. What I found can be broadly categorised under 4 topics and arguably these topics are impacting each other.

1. AI is taking the spotlight.
2. Venture capital funding has decreased (see point 1?)
3. Challenges in the broader crypto market (Thanks Sam)
4. Technical and some practical challenges.

A little bit more about each area:

1. AI is taking the spotlight: There probably doesn't need to be much added to this statement. From a use case perspective, the opportunity list is long and extremely broad and there are very few challenges to adoption (ask my kids smashing out their homework on GPT).
2. Venture Capital funding: I read an article recently on Coindesk.com that mentioned VC funding was down 76% between July 2022 and July 2023. Even though is 12 months ago, there was a clear correlation between this decline and the uptick in AI investment.
3. Challenges in the broader crypto market: The demise of exchanges like FTX, and a carousel of scams and failures across the industry as more broadly tainted the business lens of this technology.
4. Technical and practical challenges: Web 3 is costly and the adoption and maintenance is difficult without deep technical expertise. Last but not least there are often scalability challenges where performance can quickly degrade.

I hope Web 3.0 does continue to progress behind the scenes and becomes something more viable for adoption. The concepts around ownership of data and immutability are important in a world which moves more and more online.