Attribution rules the world (and it'll rule Web3 too)

I’m dubious that much else of Web 2 will survive the hop to Web 3, either from the tech or consumer point of view. The one thing I’m absolutely convinced will have to exist for Web 3 to succeed is effective and natively on-chain attribution that gives NFTs and other virtual goods their due (and gets their owners paid).

If you think about it though, the one piece of core Web 2 infrastructure where the blockchain is actually the most natural way to engineer things is … attribution. What else is a company like Branch Metrics (my former employer) or the internal attribution system at giants like Facebook, but a large, distributed, semi-private ledger of online events... See more

Correct attribution in Web3 isn’t some horrible intrusion of skeumorphic Web 2 machinery, it’s a way to correctly credit a digital asset (and ultimately its owner) with the revenue they produced, in whatever downstream form. It’s the causal link that joins a human interacting with virtual goods and the very real revenue they eventually generate.

Whoever last touched the user gets the credit. This is part of what underwrites Google’s trillion-dollar market cap: the ability to claim that everyone who bought something via a Google search bought that thing because of Google.

Why is Twitter—our global public square where tastes are made, people canceled, and heads of state threaten each other with nuclear hellfire—worth so little a billionaire can scrape together the cash to outright buy it? How is it possible that the upstream media source to everything bought or voted on is worth a pittance compared to Google or Faceb... See more