I have been intensely fascinated by web3 at various points, and almost equally disappointed by it. The fascination and the disappointment tend to arrive together.

To understand why I care, you have to go back further.

web1

For someone who was building things on the early web, what we now retrospectively call web1 was genuinely special. Forums and CMS platforms had recognisable structures, but the content made every one of them feel different. Geocities was ghastly to look at — flashing images, mismatched fonts, colour combinations that should never have been allowed — but you never saw two pages the same. For builders, the real individuality was in personal webpages. Some people used tools like Microsoft FrontPage, which let anyone drag components onto a page and hit publish without touching the underlying code. It played fast and loose with web standards and the HTML it produced was ugly enough that I refused to use it on principle, but it meant anyone could build. Dreamweaver was different but I felt similarly about it. I preferred to write my own code — not because I thought I could do it better, but because when I saw something I liked on someone else’s site I’d view the source to understand how it worked and didn’t want people to see the trash that Frontpage was churning out. I assumed everyone did this. I was probably in the minority.

web2

Web2, as I’d define it, was the moment that individuality got swept away. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter — platforms where the limit of your self-expression is the text you write or the content you post, within boundaries the platform owner sets and can change without asking you. They decide what you can say, how it’s displayed, and how any revenue your content generates gets divided. A successful YouTube creator makes decent money, and fair enough — YouTube hosts everything and deserves a share. But most creators have fringe channels and see nothing, even though those fringe channels are part of what makes the platform worth visiting in the first place. The small ones are the funnel. They just don’t get paid like it.

Web2, in short, is a few titans deciding what you can do, how it should look, and when you get a share of the value your own content creates for them.

web3

So web3 — the idea of web3 — genuinely excited me. A return to individuality. A chance to move content away from platform owners and back into the hands of the people who create it. Provenance for original ideas, so that when a small creator brings something genuinely new into the world and a bigger creator copies it and reaches a larger audience, there’s at least a mechanism to trace — and maybe reward — the original. I don’t know if that’s fully achievable. I wanted to believe it was.

What web3 has actually delivered, so far, is digital wealth. Currencies that confuse normies. NFTs — possibly the greatest waste of a good idea in the history of technology. What could have been an immutable record of concert ticket ownership, or car service history, or academic credentials, became a market for silly digital art trading at prices that made no sense to anyone outside the room. The underlying idea was sound. The execution was a gold rush.

I dived in anyway, because that’s what I do.

Most of the documentation and tooling I found was centred on digital currencies — creating them, tracking them, manipulating them, auditing them. Very little of it was pointed at building a new kind of internet. I tried a smart contract. The testing environment required fake credits to call the contract, and the contract consumed fake credits to run. The whole infrastructure felt like it was asking: how do we make this about money? Maybe that’s fair. Maybe that’s the point. But if the answer to “who benefits from web3 transactions?” is still “the people who got into the ecosystem earliest and accumulated the most,” then we haven’t freed ourselves from anything. We’ve just built a new pyramid with different people at the top.

To understand the mechanics properly I built an ERC token in Solidity. I called it wallaceCoin. I even made it a logo, which in hindsight is either endearing or embarrassing depending on how you look at it. I looked at what I’d made and tried to articulate why wallaceCoin would be better than any other Ethereum token. I couldn’t. What I did notice was that the Ethereum ecosystem has a structural incentive to keep producing competing tokens, because they all pay to exist on the network. The competition is the point. The house always wins.

I also built a Solana staking dashboard — something that lives in web2 and looks at web3. Interesting to build, limited in real value. It felt like a metaphor for where I’d ended up with the whole exploration.

I’ve argued for web3 in places where it actually makes sense to me. Online voting, where immutability is genuinely valuable. I even proposed it to my kids’ school as a way to introduce Solidity early — creating a simple piece of digital art tied to an attendance record, building a blockchain without the financial mechanics layered on top. The school got nervous the deeper I went and eventually decided it was too complex. Which is probably fair.

The blockchain concept itself I still believe in. For supply chains, property records, provenance tracking — genuinely brilliant. It’s just a shame that the loudest voices in the space seem to think web3 is primarily a place to get rich, and the mechanism for getting rich is to build pyramids around your chosen currency and hope enough people join after you.

I’m still hoping for the version of web3 that returns the internet to the individual. I just haven’t found it yet. And until I do, I can’t justify throwing my life into looking for it.

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