Hello, it’s Jayvee. Some of you may know me as the sitting Technology Editor for The Philippine Star. Others may know me as a project founder and CMO for Anito Legends, a GameFi project with a 100% Filipino team. Well, today I’m taking on a new role as editor for Multiverse.PH, The Philippine Star’s Web3 publication.
Over the past 3 years I was swept into the whirlwind of Web3. Partly due to the pandemic, and partly due to a longing for the sense of community that I missed back in the Web2 days. Filipinos will always find an excuse to meet in person, and Web3 is no different. Slowly, NFT Twitter avatars melted away to reveal real faces, with me attaching voices I would hear on Twitter Spaces or Discord to a full body at some mixer in Poblacion.
Like any new industry trying to break into the mainstream, there is no lack of controversy. Rugpulls, scams, hacks are the common potholes along the highway to industry acceptance. Web3 games, guilds, DAO’s, airdrops, NFT art projects — these are but a few projects I’ve exposed myself to in the past 36 months. I, an old timer, am late in the game. But I think I bring about a sobering blanket as I hear stories of the youth in their 20’s gambling their college tuition fees for some shady-get-rich-quick crypto scheme, or by betting everything they have on a Web3 game where their (now disbanded) guildmates have promised returns. On the flipside, I’ve seen how Web3 has also changed lives for the better and invented new jobs such as X Spaces Hosts and Discord Community Managers.
This year, 2024, I don my journalist hat to hear stories straight from the mouths of project founders, influencers, and other stakeholders in the Web3 space. When I pitched a full rebrand of Multiverse to some, I told them that I wanted the site to be run like a community magazine, where we are inside looking out. By this, I mean that The Philippine Star is commited to telling the lifechanging stories of the people behond the tech so that the industry will recognize the value of the Web3 proposition. We’ve done this before in the Web2 space, and I’ve contributed a bit writing about blogging communities through my personal blog. Let me tell you an open secret: the tell-tale sign of industry acceptance is when an agency builds an in-house department solely for Web3, because the client has a need to explore the space. It snowballs from there.
A decade ago, we were trying to convince brands to have a Facebook page. Now everyone has one. Maybe this time, it’s about convincing a local brand to launch their own NFT collection. Or airdrop. Or token. Or collab. Sky’s the limit. If we’re all going to make it, then the industry needs to be as ubiquitous as a free Instagram filter. To hell with whitelists and grinding. LFG!
If you’re a local Web3 project owner or stakeholder, feel free to reach out to me. I’m @jayvee on Twitter / X. I am not interested in shilling tokens or airdrops. Rather I want to talk about how projects are changing lives.