People are the New Platforms

Or if you like: people become the new platforms. 

To see what’s radically different between web1 and web3, consider the example of Brave Browser: advertisers pay the browser’s users to watch ads through Brave’s native token, with users making more than twice as much revenue as Brave itself. Users take the place of the traditional ad platform, even as they’re directly incentivized to share Brave it... See more

On the simplest level, web3 can allow us to “bring our whole selves” to platforms without fear of scrutiny or judgment by aggregating our online data and sharing the parts we find relevant to receive better recommendations and find better opportunities. Web3 enables us to traverse all these spaces and carry this identity—in the form of an address w... See more

On phones today, the foundational element is an app, right? That’s the organizing principle for kind of your phone and how you navigate it.

In other words, the next step is not giving users ways to aggregate existing types of data, but to mediate and collect new forms of data altogether.

platforms have an opportunity to build an underlying social graph of unique data and then to self-cannibalize by letting other platforms draw on it: the real financial opportunity for every platform, in other words, is to become a protocol that others build on top of.

The internet, we could say, is still running in a fairly agrarian economy, as that most precious digital commodity—data—is consigned to the localities of individual platforms: Spotify, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and, yes, Facebook. The metaverse, Zuckerberg suggests, is a railroad between these local economies that lets them exchange data with the u... See more

And second—at least in theory, if not always practice—the platforms are not much greater than the sum of their users. Because it’s the users who govern the platforms, own its token, and even use platforms to transact in the token.

In other words, open-source protocols accelerate innovation by letting anyone build, so that with proper financial incentives for creators, they can quickly take the place of closed web2 protocols. That makes it hard for platforms to extract value, however, since open-source environments let anyone fork the platform and redeploy it with lower commi... See more

Users are the marketplace. Uniswap points to the increasing power of individuals not just to build out platforms like Dune or The Graph but become platforms themselves.