The selling point of web3 is using decentralized technology to take back our autonomy and power on the internet.

Bitcoin and Ethereum have given us the first stepping stones: a decentralized currency layer and a decentralized utility layer. NFTs, crypto trading, and gaming have made use of these foundations and built the a new layer on top: a consumer layer.

If we truly want to build a decentralized future together, how the consumer layer plays out is important.

The problem is that the consumer layer is vulnerable to re-centralization

Private companies build projects on top of these open protocols.

A good example is OpenSea (a popular NFT platform). They are an influential, centralized, private company in the NFT space.

Using OpenSea, you can upload your digital art to their platform and enable others to purchase it as an NFT. If a user buys it, the ETH they pay with and the NFT they receive lives on the Ethereum chain.

However, all the data of your OpenSea listing does not live on Ethereum. This information lives on OpenSea's private database, and is owned and managed by them. The mint fees are paid to OpenSea, and is how they earn revenue.

The fear is that companies like these will become the tech giants of web3, like Google and Facebook in web2.

The value of a web3 service should be extracted by those who power it, instead of those who "own" it

Uniswap (decentralized trading) and The Graph (decentralized apis) are both great examples of truly decentralized and permissionless services.

Instead of a centralized company owning servers which provide the service, individual members of the community power the network by running their own nodes. These nodes provide the service, and the providers earn a profit through fees. Anyone contributing to the network by building or providing leadership can also be paid in network tokens or governance tokens.

The network itself earns no money, but the stakeholders earn money as the protocol's tokens increase in value.

How to make a stand, both as a consumer and as a builder

As consumers: support projects and platforms which are truly decentralized.

As founders and builders: store data and provide services in a decentralized manner (by developing these protocols), and strive to eventually run the organization as a DAO with decentralized governance.