Remember Web3? The decentralised future where users owned their data and corporations did not control everything? The revolution that was going to disrupt Big Tech and return power to the people?
It was speculation. That is all it ever was. The tech industry took gambling on tokens and wrapped it in revolutionary language to make it sound like innovation. The revolution was not coming. The tokens were coming. That was the whole thing.
Web3 is dead now and we can finally admit what it was.
The pitch was compelling if you did not look too closely. The current internet is controlled by corporations. They harvest your data, manipulate your feeds, extract your attention. Web3 would fix this with decentralisation. Blockchain would remove the intermediaries. You would own your own data, your own identity, your own digital assets. The reality was tokens. Every Web3 project had a token. The token had value because people bought it hoping it would have more value later. The innovation, such as it was, existed to justify the token. The token was the point.
This is not how genuine technological change works. The internet did not have a token. Mobile did not have a token. The technologies that actually changed things were adopted because they were useful, not because early adopters could profit by getting in before others.
Every Web3 investor was hoping to cash out to a greater fool. The entire ecosystem was built on the expectation of rising prices. Projects were evaluated not by utility but by token appreciation potential. The question was never does this solve a problem but will this token pump. The builders knew this. The investors knew this. Everyone knew this but pretended otherwise. The revolutionary language was marketing. It helped tokens pump because it sounded better than we are gambling and hoping you buy after us.
When the pumping stopped, so did the revolution. If Web3 had genuine utility independent of speculation, it would have survived the price crash. It did not survive because there was no utility. The speculation was not a side effect of innovation. The speculation was the only thing there.
Venture capital flooded into Web3 not because they believed in decentralisation but because they saw returns. The model was simple. Invest early, acquire tokens, pump the narrative, exit to retail. The retail investors were the exit liquidity. This is not investing in innovation. This is manufacturing hype to extract money from people who believe the hype. The VCs were not wrong about the opportunity. They made money. They just made it by exploiting others, not by funding useful technology.
The same VCs who funded Web3 are now funding AI. The pattern continues. Find the narrative. Invest early. Pump the story. Exit before the crash. The technology changes but the playbook stays the same.
In the years of Web3 hype, what was actually built? Speculation infrastructure. Exchanges for trading tokens. Wallets for holding tokens. DeFi protocols for leveraging tokens. NFT marketplaces for trading tokens in a different form. All of it was infrastructure for gambling dressed up as innovation. The decentralised applications that were supposed to replace centralised services did not materialise. There is no decentralised social network anyone uses. There is no decentralised file storage anyone relies on. There is no decentralised anything that provides utility comparable to centralised alternatives. The building went into speculation infrastructure because that is where the money was. If you were actually trying to build useful technology, Web3 was the wrong place to do it. If you were trying to facilitate gambling, it was perfect.
Some things that got lumped into Web3 were genuinely useful. Cryptographic verification of digital assets has applications. Smart contracts have narrow use cases. Some of the infrastructure work on consensus mechanisms was interesting computer science. But these things did not need Web3. They did not need tokens. They did not need the hype and the speculation and the revolutionary language. They could have been developed quietly as niche tools without the circus. Web3 claimed credit for anything involving blockchain or cryptography. The useful bits were unrelated to the speculation. They would have been developed anyway. Web3 just added the gambling.
The Web3 hangover is still being processed. Projects are pivoting. Companies are rebranding. The word Web3 is being quietly removed from pitch decks and LinkedIn profiles. Nobody wants to be associated with it anymore. The people who made money got out. The people who lost money are trying to forget. The people who built careers on Web3 evangelism are pivoting to AI evangelism because the playbook works again.
The technology will be remembered as a speculative bubble, not as innovation. The revolution that was promised never came because it was never real. The tokens were real. The speculation was real. The revolution was marketing.
Web3 was the tech industry’s attempt to make speculation sound innovative. It worked for a while. It does not work anymore. We can stop pretending now.