<h2>JPEG that costs 6x more than Ronaldo's villa</h2><p>If you took a look at the picture below and had to guess what is more expensive 10, 5 or even a year ago, the answer would be a no-brainer. Not just that, you would probably call me a fool for asking such question. However with the emerging NFT market and rise of <a href="https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks" target="_blank">CryptoPunks</a> popularity, we have a world where pixelated JPEG <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/10/covid-alien-cryptopunk-nft-sells-for-11point7-million-in-sothebys-auction.html" target="_blank">was bought </a>for 11M$ compared to "measly" 1.6M$ that <a href="https://robbreport.com/shelter/celebrity-homes/cristiano-ronaldo-marbella-spanish-villa-2860759/" target="_blank">Christiano paid for his villa</a> in Spain.</p><p>And what makes this story even more exciting is the fact, that this JPEG is not the only expensive one. There are 10 000 just from this collection and currently the cheapest goes for around $140 000. It used to be all fun and games until JPEGs really took over. </p><h2>Wait, but how does it make sense?</h2><p>In my native language often times when you refer to someone living kind of hippie lifestyle and barely making it, you use expression "oh, they are an artist". It is so deeply ingrained in our culture that as an artist it is impossible to make a good living. Web 3.0 is slowly changing that. The infrastructure that is now built around people selling their NFTs is absolutely phenomenal. Anyone who has an artist within them can now fairly easily put it out in the world and with a little bit of promotion sell it for reasonable amounts of money. It is really fantastic to see the joy and read the stories of artists who are now able to secure themselves financially thanks to Web 3.0 platforms on it. I am not an art expert or collector by any means, but the fact that the logistics of obtaining super rare art are similar to getting an ice cream at the nearest grocery store is something that very much excites me. Well, also the speculative part of trading NFTs is not boring at all, but in the end when trade happens, royalties are paid.</p><h2>Your wallet is your identity</h2><p>Expensive JPEGs as Twitter identities is just half the story. Now lots of very well know people have changed their Twitter handles to names that correspond to their wallet addresses. And that's not even it. Amount of apps you can login with various crypto wallet web extensions is rising super fast. Given the amount of people in the world and the fact that Metamask extension has just around 1M users, the revolution of Web 3.0 is just beginning. In fact related to this, the Stacks blockchain that is closest to my heart, just recently released <a href="https://www.hiro.so/blog/hiro-wallet-officially-available-in-chrome-and-firefox-stores" target="_blank">their wallet extension</a> in Chrome web store.</p><p></p>

Light read about fun and utility of the earliest things we see on Web 3.0. Expensive JPEGs,  wallet as an identity and much more.

Why Web 3.0 is fun?