Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution

It's getting late on a Saturday afternoon in Denver when I lean back and take in the full weirdness of what I’m doing. I’m seated at a long plastic folding table against the wall in a windowless room, a Discord server open on my laptop. Pizza crusts and empty potato chip bags are piled up around me, evidence of the feverish hours I’ve spent hacking together a project with a trio of blockchain developers. I’m not a programmer, just a journalist with a law degree. Yet somehow I’ve gotten swept up in creating my own DAO—a decentralized autonomous organization, a favorite concept among the starry-eyed proponents of Web3—and it’s supposed to launch tomorrow.

No doubt you have questions. So do I. Like: What happened to me? Three days ago I was a crypto skeptic who could barely figure out how to buy ether. Now I’m speaking in complete sentences about multisig treasuries and quadratic voting. The devs have almost integrated our site with non-MetaMask wallets, and I’ve just dropped $85 for a domain on the Ethereum Name Service despite having no clear use for it. And rather than feeling exasperated or baffled, I seem to have caught the same thrill, however fleetingly, as everyone around me.

I am among the estimated 10,000 people who arrived in Colorado a few days ago for this year’s ETHDenver conference, the biggest and oldest event in the world of Ethereum and Web3. Most of these folks came here to be among their people. I came to try to understand them. And I think I finally do.

The term Web3, as you may or may not have noticed, emerged from obscurity last year, buoyed by rising cryptocurrency prices and some canny marketing by venture capitalists. Its meaning is hard to pin down. In the media and on Twitter, Web3 has become a catchall for anything having to do with blockchains and cryptocurrency: People paying tens of thousands of dollars for digital collectibles known as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, with neither practical nor aesthetic value, then flipping them for even ungodlier sums. “Play-to-earn” video games that lure gamers into flimsy virtual worlds with the promise of riches. Celebrities shilling crypto exchanges during the Super Bowl. A ceaseless parade of scams, hacks, and frauds.

But to a core of true believers, Web3 stands apart from the garish excesses and brazen misbehavior of the flashing-neon crypto casino. If cryptocurrency was originally about decentralizing money, Web3 is about decentralizing … everything. Its mission is almost achingly idealistic: to free humanity not only from Big Tech domination but also from exploitative capitalism itself—and to do it purely through code.

Bitcoin, the original blockchain-based cryptocurrency, created a way to send and receive digital money without needing a bank to approve those transactions. Instead of regulators and cops, a set of carefully designed incentives would, in theory, keep everyone acting in the best interests of all Bitcoin users. Web3 aims to apply these two concepts—decentralization and game theory—to all of digital life. The main vehicle for this is Ethereum, a blockchain that borrowed Bitcoin’s key features and added a major innovation: It was designed with its own programming language so developers could build apps, and eventually a whole new decentralized digital infrastructure, to run on it.

If Bitcoin attracts anarcho-capitalists who want to dethrone the central bankers, the culture around Ethereum and Web3 has a more progressive bent. After I walked into the Denver Sports Castle, a massive former sporting goods store turned events space that served as ETHDenver’s main venue, the first panel I caught was about using blockchains to build “public goods.” Another was titled “Navigating the Web3 Workforce as a BIPOC, Queer, Marginalized Individual.” (The overall crowd skewed heavily white and male.) Aesthetically, ETHDenver embraced a spirit of collaborative, LARPish make-believe; there was quite a bit of talk about the Bufficorn, the cartoon buffalo-unicorn hybrid that was the event’s NFT mascot. (It fuses the magic of the unicorn with the strength of the buffalo.) People communicated with all manner of cheerful memes: gm, for “good morning,” was the universal greeting, regardless of the time of day; wagmi meant “we’re all gonna make it.”