Immutable's Web3 problem
New filings from Australia's fourth largest private tech company explain why it's now calling itself an AI-marketing platform.
This time five years ago, venture capitalists all over the world were practically foaming at the mouth to invest in anything even remotely tied to cryptocurrency and the so-called Web3 revolution. Investors from Silicon Valley to Sydney were heralding the third era of the internet with lofty claims that decentralised finance, non-fungible tokens and the metaverse would transfigure society as we know it.
Venture capitalists poured more than $US33 billion ($48 billion) into Web3 start-ups in 2021 alone, according to data from cryptocurrency merchant bank Galaxy Digital. These companies all hinged on the promise of allowing people to generate real money through their digital identity. The concept was so big that Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company from Facebook to Meta and spent more than $US50 billion developing a now largely-defunct virtual reality arm.
The Web3 hype has come and gone, not helped by the fact Bitcoin is trading at less than half its peak $126,279 price, while Ethereum is down 65 per cent, despite favourable legislative changes and regulatory clarity in the US courtesy of its meme-coin friendly President Donald Trump. The Bored Ape NFTs – which were snavelled up by everyone from Justin Bieber to the biggest tech investors in the world like Andreessen Horowitz – now seem like a relic of a bygone era, long ago superseded by the industry's new obsession: artificial intelligence.
By far the biggest Australian winner from the crypto zeal of years past was Immutable, a Web3 start-up helmed by two Sydney-based brothers, Robbie and James Ferguson, and their co-founder Alex Connolly. It was founded in 2018 as a platform that would launch online games on the blockchain.
