Web3: The Word Everyone Uses and Nobody Agrees On
Web3 has become the dominant framing for crypto's vision of the future internet — user-owned, token-incentivised, and decentralised. The vision is compelling. The definition is vague. And the gap between the marketing and the reality is where the hard work lives.
Web3: The Word Everyone Uses and Nobody Agrees On
Sometime in 2021, "crypto" became "web3." The rebranding was not coordinated — it emerged organically from venture capital pitch decks, Twitter threads, and conference keynotes. But it was effective. "Crypto" carried baggage — speculation, scams, volatility, environmental concerns. "Web3" carried aspiration — a new internet owned by users rather than corporations, where value accrues to participants rather than platforms, and where identity, data, and digital assets are controlled by individuals rather than intermediaries.
The vision is compelling. The definition is vague. And the gap between the two is where the interesting questions live.
What Web3 Claims to Be
The web3 narrative follows a historical arc. Web1 (1990s-2000s) was read-only — static websites, one-way information flow, users as consumers of content. Web2 (2000s-2020s) was read-write — social media, user-generated content, platforms as intermediaries that capture the value created by their users. Web3 is read-write-own — blockchain-based applications where users own their data, their identity, and their digital assets, and where value is distributed through tokens rather than captured by platforms.
In this framing, web3 is the antidote to the platform monopolies that define web2. Instead of Facebook owning your social graph, you own it — stored on a blockchain, portable across applications. Instead of Spotify capturing 70% of music revenue, artists distribute directly to fans through NFTs and token-gated content. Instead of AWS controlling the infrastructure, decentralised networks provide compute, storage, and bandwidth.
What Web3 Actually Is (Today)
The reality of web3 in 2021 is more modest than the vision. Most web3 applications are DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces, and DAOs — useful and innovative, but serving a narrow, crypto-native audience. The user experience is poor — managing wallets, signing transactions, paying gas fees. The infrastructure is immature — slow, expensive, and fragile under load. And many "web3" projects are web2 applications with a token bolted on — centralised services that use blockchain for settlement or incentive distribution but do not meaningfully decentralise control or ownership.
The gap between the vision and the reality is not a reason to dismiss web3. It is a description of where the work needs to happen. The early internet was also slow, ugly, and limited in its applications. The vision of what it could become drove the investment and development that eventually made it indispensable. Web3 is at a similar stage — the vision is ahead of the technology, and the technology needs to catch up.
The Legitimate Criticism
The most legitimate criticism of web3 is not that the technology does not work — it does, within its current limitations. It is that the token-incentive model creates dynamics that are difficult to distinguish from speculation. When every web3 project has a token, and the token's value depends on adoption, and adoption is driven by token incentives, the system becomes circular — and it is difficult to determine whether users are engaging with the product because it is useful or because they are being paid to engage.
This criticism echoes the ICO era, and it is not unfounded. Many web3 projects will fail for the same reason many ICOs failed — because the token incentive masked the absence of genuine product-market fit. The projects that succeed will be the ones that retain users after the incentives end.
My View
Web3 is a useful framing for a real set of technologies and ideas — user ownership, token incentives, decentralised infrastructure, composable applications. The vision is directionally correct even if the current implementation is early and imperfect. The challenge is to build the infrastructure, improve the user experience, and demonstrate genuine utility that persists beyond token speculation.
The word "web3" will eventually fade, as all buzzwords do. What will remain is the technology and the applications that were built under its banner. The quality of those applications — not the quality of the marketing — will determine whether web3 was a genuine paradigm shift or a rebranding exercise.
Web3 is not a product. It is a thesis — that the next generation of internet applications will be user-owned, token-incentivised, and built on open infrastructure. The thesis is compelling. The execution is early. And the gap between the two is where the opportunity lives.