Web3 has been one of the biggest buzzwords in Silicon Valley lately, triggering enthusiastic projections of its importance and vigorous debates about just what it is.
Square and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey threw down on Twitter late last month, triggering a spat of sorts about the subject with billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
"You don’t own 'Web3.' The VCs and their LPs do," Dorsey declared.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk jumped in with a quip, saying that he couldn’t find Web3. To which Dorsey retorted that it was “somewhere between a and z,” a reference to the nickname for Andreessen Horowitz of A16Z.
That apparently prompted Andreessen to block Dorsey and post a string of tweets about "bad followers." Dorsey then complained that he had now been "banned from Web3."
Andreessen kept the feud alive on Tuesday with a couple of jabs on Twitter after Dorsey tweeted about the World Economic Forum, calling it "useless."
"Proud to announce my new job as Chairman of the World Economic Forum," Andreessen tweeted. He followed that up with, "As my first act as Chairman, the World Economic Forum is hereby renamed Wef3."
So what is Web3 and why are people like Dorsey and Andreessen in a spat over it?
"I don’t think it’s super easy to define," Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire founder of the crypto exchange FTX told the New York Times. “I think a lot of people see in it what they want to see."
Web3 is being promoted as the Internet's next evolution
Generally, Web3 is a term being used to describe decentralized systems powered by blockchain technology that are projected by its proponents to be the next evolution of the Internet. Web 1.0 refers to the period when most websites were static webpages, roughly from 1991 to 2004. Web 2.0 is the more interactive Internet we use now with content uploaded by users onto platforms.
The term Web3 was actually first used way back in 2014 by Gavin Wood, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain, in a Wired interview in which he predicted a decentralized form of the Internet that isn't largely controlled by big tech companies like Google, Apple and Facebook.
What that means, though, is the center of the current debate. Dorsey argues that people like Andreessen, whose Menlo Park venture firm is investing billions in blockchain startups, are out to own Web3.
"It will never escape their incentives," he wrote last month in the thread of his post. "It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label."
Alexis Goldstein of the progressive think tank Open Markets agrees. He recently told the Joint Economic Committee in Congress that "while cryptocurrency industry insiders promote the ‘democratized’ benefits of digital assets, in truth, crypto concentrations of money and power match or surpass those in traditional financial markets."
FTX founder Bankman-Fried, despite saying Web3 remains largely undefined, is cautiously enthusiastic about what it may become.
“There’s a little bit of lazy thinking going on right now in some cases where people will just say, like, ‘Ah, you know, like everything’s going to be better in Web3 land,’” he told the New York Times. “And I don’t know — some things will be. But you can’t just say the word Web3 and then assume that makes things better.”
