• Former Google CEO Eric Shmidt has revealed that he has started investing just a little bit of his vast fortune in cryptocurrencies, although he didn’t reveal which ones.
• He, however, says that he’s most interested in Web3 and a decentralized Internet which he believes is the future while also touting tokenomics.

Web3 is the future of the Internet. This has been a common declaration and the latest to partake in it is one of the most influential tech leaders in the world – Eric Schmidt. The former Google CEO and executive chairman also revealed that he has invested a little of his fortune in crypto.

Schmidt was the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, a period in which the search engine company rose to become one of the world’s most dominant, even as a majority of dot com giants fell. It was also at this time that Google expanded into every other sector, including its 2006 purchase of YouTube which has gone on to become a global video hosting giant.

In an interview with CNBC, the Princeton-educated software engineer hailed Web3 as the future.

A new model [of the internet]where you as an individual [can]control your identity, and where you don’t have a centralized manager, is very powerful. It’s very seductive and it’s very decentralized. I remember that feeling when I was 25 that decentralized would be everything.

Web3, as CNF has reported, is a new version of the Internet that is based on decentralization. Blockchain plays a key role, allowing users to own their data and gradually taking the power away from behemoths like Amazon, Facebook and even Google, the company that Schmidt helped shape.

Related: Excited about Web3? Beware of these crypto and blockchain phishing methods

Schmidt rose to become not only one of the most respected tech leaders but also one of the world’s richest people, mostly based on his Google (now Alphabet) stock. As of April 2022, Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranked him as the 54th-richest person in the world with a net worth just north of $25 billion.

If he was to start over again in today’s tech landscape, the 67-year-old says he would focus on Web3 or artificial intelligence. In particular, his interest in Web3 lies in tokenomics, which are the economic models upon which digital assets are built and deployed.

[Web3′s] economics are interesting. The platforms are interesting and the use patterns are interesting. [It] doesn’t work yet, but it will.