After Crypto

We’re building Metalabel with these primitives because it’s hard for us to see why we would, in 2022, make a web product that would trap a creator’s work in a walled garden, that wouldn’t offer utility beyond our walls, and that wouldn’t share value with the people who create it. These are radical and important goals — radical in a way that many cr... See more

The artist and writer Mat Dryhurst often says to blockchain critics: “Tell me what you’re voting for.” If you’re against all blockchain-related tech, then are you arguing for the current state and ownership structure of the internet? What are you arguing for, rather than against?

As Vitalik Buterin notes in a recent essay exploring non-financial use cases of crypto, “blockchains are just a really convenient place to store stuff.”

So long as everything that touches a public ledger is vilified as a scam and part of some dystopian future, the number of responsible people and teams who feel inspired to thoughtfully explore projects that see beyond the constraints of our Web2 systems will be limited.

After 18 months of learning and filtering with that lens, there were three changes made possible by blockchains that I couldn’t unsee:

2. Distributing ownership and influence outside an organization

1. The decline of platform lock-in: The blessing (for the company) and curse (for the customer) of most Web2 businesses is lock-in — your most important data stays on the platform where you created it.

Blindly dismissing any project that touches a blockchain because it shares the same plumbing as crypto is like missing the forest for the logging industry.

In contrast, Web3 data, for the most part, is platform-agnostic. Most actions taken on Web3-native tools result in some token or recognition appearing in your digital wallet — a secure folder that’s permanently yours and interoperable with other sites and platforms.

To say there’s an “after crypto” isn’t calling for the end of crypto or to discredit projects in that space. It’s to say there are potentially groundbreaking and perfectly valid reasons to create tools built around public ledgers that aren’t only about crypto. Our thinking needs to evolve.