Hey Jack, let me explain Web3 🙄

Not to pick on you, Jack, but this screenshot of your tweet is the last drop that got me motivated to write this, and I hope it will help all the others who spread misguided information about Web3.

What ‘ownership’ means in Web3

The promise of web3 has never been evenly distributed ownership. This thing does not exist, even in communist utopias.

There’s a reason to that: people will always prefer to delegate their power and the management of resources to others. Not sure why so many consider it a bad thing. I’m happy to not have to invest in train infrastructure. I don’t know anything about it and I hope someone will take my tax money and do a better job than me at it.

Now this being said, it’s not because I’m not interested in owning the train company, that I would give away ownership of my luggage and my kidney by virtue of entering the train. Web3 is about allowing people to navigate across the web and keep ownership of their digital kidney, and maybe leave the train with a fraction of ownership of the train, and maybe even better, some voting rights related to decisions taken by the train operators.

From 100% to 2.5% commission

Twitter’s valuation is currently around 30 Billion USD. I love the app. It’s well designed, it works pretty well, it provides a nice experience. But don’t you think that a lot of your wealth and the wealth of Twitter’s shareholders has to do with the intellectual property that all the users have given away so you could monetise on their behalf and retain 100% of the revenue? All the creativity, the memes, the quotes, the twitstorms, the videos, the infographics… you guys took all this value and put it straight into your pockets. Web 3.0 is surely solving this problem which you’re trying to escape by making a vague and misleading statement about VCs.

See, currently OpenSea and other NFT platforms have gained a pretty nice valuation and yes, VCs lined their pockets with it. But where they took 2.5% fee on the distribution of intellectual property, you guys took 100%, and on top of those 100% you have added a multiplier thanks to appreciation of the equity from speculators.

Arbitrary censorship and manipulation

Yesterday, on Twitter, an eminent scientist was “deleted” without even knowing why it happened. This scientist is Robert Malone, the co-inventor of the mRNA technology.

If Twitter was running on a blockchain, it would have been impossible for Twitter Inc. to delete that content arbitrarily. Apparently, YouTube is now deleting the Joe Rogan show of the same guest. With web3.0 technologies, there would likely be a governance mechanism where the public and the app developers would discuss and decide democratically how to handle content policies. It would have been a public process, by the owners of the platform, a community of potentially hundreds of thousands of owners would have openly voted with their tokens wether or not this scientist should be deplatformed. There would have been something called “a democratic process”, something that web2 overlord can’t even comprehend.

By building a straw man out of the claim that web3.0 would have to be an evenly owned model for the underlying tokens, you’re distracting the world from the real issue: on Web3.0 people own their assets, their data, their intellectual property, their content, their opinions.

Yes VCs own a good chunk of Web3.0

And there are many reasons why I’m fine with it, and as a Web3 issuer will happily work with many kinds of centralised and decentralised VCs

1. They know what they’re doing

VCs have been delegated some funds by third parties in order to research, review, assess and select projects on their behalf. In the same way as a curator in a museum, a buyer at a fashion retail or an HR in a big company will try to identify talent, valuable ideas and committed teams. It’s a pretty hard job with high risks and losses. When you see them owning 20% of a web3 project, you’re not seeing the 20 others they invested in where there was no return.

2. They are bankrolling the revolution

No matter if the project succeeds or fails, jobs have been created, experiences have been developed and teams are forming, entering the space, learning, building network, experimenting, iterating. All those things are made possible thanks to the funds they are adding to the space.

3. They are long term holders

Unlike retail investors and get-rich-quick schemes in crypto, most of the VCs who purchase tokens from Web3 projects will hold on them for years, stabilising the space and giving teams the time to build and succeed.

4. They add value

Most of the VCs who invest in Web3 will help with compliance, networking, publicity and all kinds of services that are instrumental to the formation of Web3. They come with a thesis and knowledge that can be highly beneficial to the space.

5. Working on their own demise

The current investments that are made by VCs in the decentralised internet are likely going to be the last of that kind. Over time, communities will be increasingly autonomous, with DAOs and Web3 founders investing in one-another on a peer-to-peer basis. VCs are accelerating the growth of this ecosystem and therefore pushing for a world where they will be less needed and will have to morph into a new type of organisations with lots of other forms of value add. We see it happening every day.

Conclusion

Web3 means you own your assets, your own intellectual property and share some governance rights with an ecosystem of individuals and organisations where the network effect happens on a public good database where the power of platforms like Twitter and others is challenged.

With Web3 if you don’t like the repartition of ownership, the content policies or the product, you can take your assets with you and join another app, because the web is no longer a bunch of silos where one is trapped and has to accept exploitation and obedience in exchange for socialisation.

Social media, like any other thing will become part of the public space, and yes some venture capitalists will participate and own a fraction of it, and it’s a great thing. Please VCs, help us build this thing faster, hire and train people, communicate, expand, invest and support the expansion of a Web where the Jacks of the world won’t be the rulers of our digital life!