In the heat of the record venture market of 2021, it couldn’t avoid the growing noise of the burgeoning web3 sector. trust me i tried. But while some of that momentum carried into 2022 (Yuga Labs closed a $450 million seed round in March), the rest of the year was relatively quiet.

Yes, venture firms as a whole had a generally quieter year in 2022, but the lack of web3 deals stood out particularly as the sector started the year with a lot of momentum. Perhaps the dramatic crashes of the Luna token and the second largest crypto exchange FTX spooked web3 investors as a whole? Has the rapid decline in consumer interest in NFTs spurred VCs to rethink the category? We decided to find out.

To get a better idea of ​​how the people who write the checks think about web3, TechCrunch surveyed more than 35 investors, and it turns out that most are not only actively investing in the category, but also harbor hopes for a bright future for it. que feel is a potentially transformative technology.

One VC, who asked to remain anonymous, said that because the technology is so nascent, we’re not seeing the true potential use cases yet, which could explain the continued lack of enthusiasm after the 2021 rally.

“Those who understand the space know that there is a lucrative future that is still in its early days,” they said. “Those who don’t understand the space know this too, but will be more hesitant to implement without a fundamental understanding of real-world applications. Almost none of the supposed benefits of web3 (decentralization, pseudonymous identities, zero-knowledge proofs, etc.) have been fully realized yet. It’s like the age of [early World Wide Web]when every web page was plain HTML with ridiculous graphics and archaic capabilities.”