Web3

Web3 is a loose umbrella term for the vision of a web whose infrastructure — identity, payments, storage, compute, governance — runs on permissionless blockchains and peer-to-peer protocols rather than on the proprietary platforms that dominate Web 2.0. The term was popularised by Gavin Wood in a 2014 essay shortly after he co-founded Ethereum, and has since expanded to cover a sprawling ecosystem of decentralized applications, DAOs, DeFi protocols, NFTs, and self-sovereign identity systems.

The framing is genuinely useful for some things and overloaded for others. Where Web3 names concrete technical claims — that users should hold their own keys, that protocols should be open and forkable, that applications should be auditable on a public ledger — it continues the cypherpunk line of architectural arguments about who controls the infrastructure that mediates ordinary life. Where it functions as a marketing label for venture-funded token launches, it has often diluted those claims, and a significant portion of what gets called "Web3" is structurally indistinguishable from the platform centralisation it claims to displace.

The serious version of the Web3 thesis is that the web's missing primitive is property — a way for users to hold and transfer state that does not require a platform to mediate. Bitcoin proved that monetary state could work this way. Ethereum generalised the idea to arbitrary state. Whether the result becomes the actual user-owned web or remains a parallel financial system is, at this point, an empirical question about adoption and protocol design rather than a settled fact in either direction. From the parallel-society perspective, the value of Web3 lies less in its branding than in the small subset of its tools that actually produce capture-resistant infrastructure when used carefully.