Web 2.5 Is the Gateway to Crypto Mass Adoption

Crypto is becoming more widely discussed every day, and most people around the world are beginning to get a sense of what this burgeoning industry is all about. Recently, my mother even asked me about NFTs!

At the same time, even as there is increased recognition of the fact that crypto is a dynamic sector worth paying attention to, it would be inaccurate to say it has fully caught on. Instead, we find ourselves lingering at the edge of something very exciting — the moment when mass adoption will really begin to take off.

And yet while many are focused on the promised land of Web3, there is still a neglected landscape that is equally worth focusing on — and that is Web2.5, the marriage of Web2’s familiarity and convenience with the ownership and collaboration qualities of Web3.

For blockchain technology to really take off, natural integration of digital asset ownership into Web2 apps is the way to go. Luckily, ThunderCore is perfectly positioned to play a leading role in this area.

Gas Costs Are Crippling Crypto

One of the hurdles to us reaching mass adoption of crypto is the high gas prices that plague blockchains like Ethereum. This dilemma reached dizzying heights in early May, when Yuga Labs, the company behind the wildly successful NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, launched NFTs for its Otherside Metaverse.

The event turned out to be the largest NFT mint yet, and it caused gas prices on the Ethereum network to shoot up to as high as $14,000, with many failed transactions. The issue became so severe that Yuga Labs said it might migrate to its own chain eventually in order to better scale. The company also offered to reimburse anyone who lost funds on a failed Ethereum transaction.

This area of high gas costs is one where ThunderCore really shines. While there are a number of very fast public blockchains, ThunderCore is both fast and inexpensive. Our gas fees are below $0.00001. For this reason, among others, we see ourselves as ideally suited to help onboard new users and developers to the blockchain world.

The Road to Web 3

Firstly, it’s important to lay out where we’re going in the development of the internet — as well as where we’ve been.

Web1 & 2

In the first phase of the internet, known as Web1, the content was presented to users by a relatively small number of creators, democratizing access to information. The successor to that version of the internet became known as Web2, which has been based on user-generated content and interaction between users themselves as well as with platforms. This is the era from which we are still trying to break out. It’s a period that has been characterized by the growth of companies such as Twitter and Facebook, with the vast majority of profits from the user-generated content in Web2 remaining firmly in the hands of the tech companies.

Web3

Web3 enables collaboration between strangers with common goals, such as pooling liquidity to form a credit market in the case of Aave, or coming together to jointly govern a project like MakerDAO, which puts out the stablecoin DAI. This is the new vision of the internet, the decentralized version that is powered by blockchain technology and built for its users. And yet at the moment, it’s still very difficult for beginners. It should be obvious that what we need to do here is make use of the best of Web2 as we go about building the future of the internet.

In Web2.5, collaboration and convenience can co-exist

In Web3, as I have just mentioned, the standards are not nearly as user-friendly as we need them to become. There are wallets that need to be set up, tokens that must be swapped, and hackers lurking everywhere trying to gain their points of entry into the vulnerable accounts of unsuspecting newcomers.

This is where Web2.5 comes in — as the next step that helps onboard people who are uncomfortable setting up a MetaMask wallet or exchanging tokens on PancakeSwap and so on.

In Web2.5, you get the benefits of Web3 with the convenience of Web2. It’s the integration of Web3 elements into the old internet with which everyone is already familiar. Examples might include rare items in a videogame being ownable as NFTs or and participation in the governance of a Web2 project through a DAO. It could even just be a platform like OurSong, which allows you to mint, trade, and sell NFTs with a wallet generated by the application.

Unlike some, I am not of the view that Web3 will completely replace Web2. We are probably going to have a need for certain centralized platforms for some time to come. In reality, the two ecosystems will go hand in hand — and I think developers who have cut their teeth in Web2 will likely be the ones who bring us the first truly viral Web3 apps.

ThunderCore Can Help with Web2.5

There’s a wide variety of DApps that can function more or less the same as the old apps Web2 world — except with new blockchain features. It’s not just play-to-earn but also learn-to-earn, move-to-earn, and other models that haven’t even been dreamed up yet. And ThunderCore is ready to assist developers with all of it.

For Web2 developers looking to go down the Web2.5 route, there are strong incentives to do so. Crucially, through tokenizations, developers can make their users into stakeholders — in effect, their brand ambassadors. In Web2, apps operate on the basis of users giving each other referral codes, which provide discounts and the like. In Web3, however, users become interested parties who have a real stake in promoting the health of the token ecosystems of which they are a part. In Web2.5, we can keep the best of both worlds, giving people the features they’ve grown accustomed to and also new forms of digital ownership.

And then there is the fortunate fact that it is still the early days of the blockchain. By getting involved now, especially for companies that have a strong Web2 presence already, it is very possible to make a strong imprint on the blockchain world. What might be considered a high number of daily active users on a DApp is still very low compared to a prominent Web2 app, so being able to port over existing customers is a huge advantage.

ThunderCore Makes Life Easier for Users and Developers

When thinking about Web2.5 users, let’s take gamers as an example. For this group of users, no prerequisite blockchain experience should be necessary to enjoy things like NFT functionality. Ideally, games in Web2.5 should be creating wallets for people, removing the need for complicated know-your-customer (KYC) checks. And this is exactly what ThunderCore brings to the table.

For users, we make it easy for their favorite games to be integrated directly with TT Wallet, so there is no need to set up a wallet with a steeper learning curve like MetaMask. Integration is even possible with our decentralized exchanges (DEXs) so that users can swap tokens. They can also send them off to exchanges like Binance, where they may prefer to store their crypto in some cases.

On the crypto development side, there are a daunting set of security liabilities that come with taking responsibility for custodianship when designing a wallet. That’s why we’ve made it easy for DApp developers to generate such features that integrate smoothly with our own first-class TT Wallet. We’ve designed the ThunderGene API tool to simplify and streamline integration into our ecosystem’s key components as well as to aid the creation of DApps generally.

We can also help developers keep their users in their DApps with advanced features such as access to DEXs (so long as the DApp provides liquidity). And we even make it easy for developers to issue their own tokens to users via our chain. Currently, we’re in the process of making it very simple to export tokens to other wallets and DApps too.

Final Thoughts

Given that we are a high-performance public blockchain with strong security features and a focus on affordability, we are on solid footing when it comes to introducing new users to the world of crypto and digital-asset ownership. In addition, we have over 400,000 monthly active users (MAU), and we’re even online in over 190 countries.

Back in 2017, I was drawn to the idea of founding ThunderCore by the belief that total strangers should be able to cooperate in a trustless environment to accomplish amazing goals with the aid of this groundbreaking technology. In order to make this a reality, we’re going to have to move beyond the early-adopter crowd. It’s clear the best way to do that is to bring the blockchain to them — by building the ladder with Web2.5.