How Crypto could revolutionize the web content industry

One application that is pretty simple, and would make the internet much better, is micropayments for content consumption. Meeting a subscription wall when clicking on a news article is really annoying, and unnecessary.

If there were a broadly adopted global financial system that enabled micropayments without surrendering private information like credit card details and home address, every web subscriber-only news site could instead charge some tiny amount—like 1 cent—to view one of its articles. This would be an option vastly more people would avail of than pulling out their credit card and making a huge commitment in the form of a monthly subscription, just to read one interesting article.

The Ethereum L2 space is growing rapidly right now, and EigenLayer's solution—which is an extra-protocol data availability layer using re-staked ETH for security—can provide L2s with massive scalability without having to wait for Ethereum to implement EIP-4844 and darksharding. Already Mantle and Celo are planning to use this strategy for scaling.

So sub-1-cent fees for Ethereum-secured transactions is starting to look realizable.