Market research firm Forrester Research is not kidding when it considers that the ” Web3 contains the seeds of a dystopian future “. In a vitriolic report, the American firm explains how the dreams of decentralized finance come up against the reality on the ground.
2021 ended in a mess of NFTs and other catch-all concepts that unite idealists and scammers alike. Web3, on the other hand, is confronted with its own limits, the main one being the lure of profit, supports the Forrester agency during a regular dismantling that hurts the blockchain.
Web3 is not the hoped-for utopia
The report, written by economic analysts at Forrester, is available for $1,495 on their site. At first glance, he criticizes the use of the term Web3, which is confused with the term Web 3.0, already used in the early 2000s. We learn that the word Web3 was brought up to date at the end of 2021 by a capital company. risk, right at a time when the whole world was engulfed in the era of NFTs.
There would be in Web3 a little taste of Web 2.0, which could have become a model where Internet users own the Web if they had not realized that the whole system revolves around only 3 or 4 sites (Facebook, Google and co) who ended up dictating their lives to users by collecting their data. The finding of Web3 and blockchain is similar, with a handful of major players controlling most projects.
In fact, decentralized finance is, on paper, a beautiful project, but the big ideas that make it up (“ Trust the code, not the companies ”) are impossible to implement, according to the report. Even if a community organizes itself into smart contracts and makes the code public and transparent, deviations may still occur.
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Decentralized finance victim of cash king
Of the nine ideas that demonstrate the possibility of a Web3 based on sharing and mutual aid, Forrester insists that money is the center of the problem, and that in crypto communities, only a small group of individuals holds all the wealth. ” As long as the financiers do not turn off the taps of this cash machine, the Web3 phenomenon will continue to see scams flourish that will overshadow more rewarding projects. On this point, it is difficult to disprove this report, when we see the many hazy projects that have made the butter of the first NFT investors.
Finally, the agency believes that decentralization is just a dream, pointing out that projects like Ethereum could not survive without centralized companies that form its backbone.
What if we radically changed the logic underlying the organization of global networks? What if the users themselves were at the heart of the networks they use? What if blockchains were also used to build freer, more efficient and better secure network infrastructures and protocols?
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Source: The Register
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