Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the encrypted communications app Signal, has a really interesting post on web3. Essentially, he points out that the current state of web3 is very much like the structure of web2 and is more centralized than it seems on the surface.

He did an experiment by making an NFT on OpenSea that varied depending on who was viewing it. Since an NFT is basically just a URL, this isn’t complex to do. The interesting thing was that this NFT was sent to /dev/null by OpenSea (despite not breaking any obvious Terms Of Service.

Even though the NFT was on the decentralized blockchain, it was not visible on OpenSea and was essentially gone because of the centralized structure of web3 in that most apps use OpenSea APIs to access the blockchain to get NFT URLs.

He points out that web3 is only interesting because of the Gold Rush mentality. It’s a good read from a guy who knows a thing or two about crypto.

web3