Ready or Not, Here Comes Web3: How the Internet’s Next Evolution Is Shaping Hollywood’s Future

variety.com:

Blockchains and metaverses. Crypto-currencies and non-fungible tokens.Over the past 12 months, as the world has eased out of pandemic crisis mode, the pop culture-verse and the Wall Street-verse have been rife with discourse and deal-making around a belief in the revolutionary potential of mind-bendingly complicated, internet-enabled new systems of communication, content creation, supply-chain management, legal documentation and banking.

This emerging world has a nomenclature all its own — the digital version of a velvet rope — but in general it refers to technologies and wildly complex computer processing applications (also referred to as data mining) that fall under the broad heading of “Web3.” Yet — simply put — what is Web3?

And perhaps just as important, why did seemingly everyone in entertainment, finance, media and law start talking about it at cocktail parties and mixers as those trappings of pre-pandemic life came back into play?

The answer is the only thing that is clear about the world of Web3: Money.“I started to pay attention to the NFT business in the midst of the pandemic,” says Chris Jacquemin, WME partner and the agency’s head of digital strategy. “By the end of 2020, the total market revenue for NFTs was $300 million.