Web3 is highly centralized and controlled by a small handful of companies
These technologies immediately tended towards centralization through platforms in order for them to be realized, that this has ~zero negatively felt effect on the velocity of the ecosystem, and that m
This might seem off-topic for this site, as this is a look at something in the tech space, but it is, in a sense, a plea for realism, in the same way that Demodexio is a plea for realism. More so, the post on Moxie amounts to an attack on a certain kind of delusional thinking about “decentralization.” It’s a theme we write about on Demodexio. Moxie makes the point that Web3 is highly centralized, yet its biggest marketing appeal is that it is supposed to be decentralized. The unwillingness of the Web3 boosters to look at Web3 and see it clearly raises the question, why can’t people see the gap between reality and their rhetoric?
Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1. To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms. Again. People who will run servers for you, and iterate on the new functionality that emerges. Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan.
Likewise, the web3 protocols are slow to evolve. When building First Derivative, it would have been great to price minting derivatives as a percentage of the underlying’s value. That data isn’t on chain, but it’s in an API that OpenSea will give you. People are excited about NFT royalties for the way that can benefit creators, but royalties aren’t specified in ERC-721, and it’s too late to change it, so OpenSea has its own way of configuring royalties that exists in web2 space. Iterating quickly on centralized platforms is already outpacing the distributed protocols and consolidating control into platforms.
Given those dynamics, I don’t think it should be a surprise that we’re already at a place where your crypto wallet’s view of your NFTs is OpenSea’s view of your NFTs. I don’t think we should be surprised that OpenSea isn’t a pure “view” that can be replaced, since it has been busy iterating the platform beyond what is possible strictly with the impossible/difficult to change standards.
I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway. Once a distributed ecosystem centralizes around a platform for convenience, it becomes the worst of both worlds: centralized control, but still distributed enough to become mired in time. I can build my own NFT marketplace, but it doesn’t offer any additional control if OpenSea mediates the view of all NFTs in the wallets people use (and every other app in the ecosystem).
This isn’t a complaint about OpenSea or an indictment of what they’ve built. Just the opposite, they’re trying to build something that works. I think we should expect this kind of platform consolidation to happen, and given the inevitability, design systems that give us what we want when that’s how things are organized. My sense and concern, though, is that the web3 community expects some other outcome than what we’re already seeing.
It’s early days
“It’s early days still” is the most common refrain I see from people in the web3 space when discussing matters like these. In some ways, cryptocurrency’s failure to scale beyond relatively nascent engineering is what makes it possible to consider the days “early,” since objectively it has already been a decade or more.
However, even if this is just the beginning (and it very well might be!), I’m not sure we should consider that any consolation. I think the opposite might be true; it seems like we should take notice that from the very beginning, these technologies immediately tended towards centralization through platforms in order for them to be realized, that this has ~zero negatively felt effect on the velocity of the ecosystem, and that most participants don’t even know or care it’s happening. This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer to the ideal outcome as the days become less early.