- The founder of a major crypto firm described the likes of Meta and Microsoft as "digital dictatorships."
- Yat Siu of Animoca Brands told Bloomberg that his and Web3's goal is to strip power from Big Tech.
- That's a core part of Web3: to decentralize technology and return power of ownership to the user.
Big tech critics have long singled out the industry as having too much power, and the cofounder of a powerful crypto giant just chimed in on the matter.
Yat Sui, who leads Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands — which backs a number of major crypto projects and owns The Sandbox — told Bloomberg in a report published Wednesday that his company has invested in more than 340 firms spanning finance, gaming, and blockchain.
The goal, he told Bloomberg, is to tear down tech giants' dominion over the industry and return online ownership of one's digital identities and properties back to users. He called the likes of Meta, Facebook's new parent company, and Microsoft "digital dictatorships" without saying more in the interview.
Siu did not immediately respond to Insider's request to elaborate.
Web3 is, in theory, the future of the internet that will live on the blockchain, the same backbone supporting cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. It won't be controlled by entities like Google or Twitter.
It's been a core part of Web3's argument that a decentralized online world can strip power from the tech monopolies of Web2, namely Meta, Google, Apple, and others. The idea is that since people's data would theoretically be decentralized — meaning living on the blockchain instead of servers owned by tech conglomerates like Amazon — that would weaken our reliance on the large companies currently dominating the space.
Web3, as it stands right now, is still merely a thought, despite Mark Zuckerberg's screaming from the rooftops that the metaverse is the future — and spending $10 billion on making it so.
However, Siu and Animoca Brands have been in the Web3 sphere since before the term became a buzzword.
The company was founded in 2014 and has poured cash into a number of significant crypto projects — it bought a stake in Dapper Labs, the parent company of Cryptokitties, in 2018 and owns The Sandbox, one of the more fleshed-out metaverses where rapper Snoop Dogg "lives."
Animoca has also backed Axie Infinity, a hot crypto game, and OpenSea, the world's largest online NFT marketplace.