A challenging thesis posits that Web 3.0 will inevitably regress into Web 2.0. This intriguing and highly educational concept is explored in depth by Moxie Marlinspike, the inventor and founder-CEO of Signal, in a recent article.
Perhaps the most critical insight from the article is encapsulated in this paragraph:
The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment mechanics, but they care about where the money is. So the money draws people into OpenSea, they improve the experience by building a platform that iterates on the underlying web3 protocols in web2 space, they eventually offer the ability to “mint” NFTs through OpenSea itself instead of through your own smart contract, and eventually this all opens the door for Coinbase to offer access to the validated NFT market with their own platform via your debit card. That opens the door to Coinbase managing the tokens themselves through dark pools that Coinbase holds, which helpfully eliminates the transaction fees and makes it possible to avoid having to interact with smart contracts at all. Eventually, all the web3 parts are gone, and you have a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card. The project can’t start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there.
You can read the entire blog post here.
Keywords: web3, wallet, blockchain, infura, alchemy, security, hype