At some level, the blockchain architecture is a return to the web1, the pre-social media architecture of the web, which was very decentralised.

We had an early golden age of the internet, largely based on open standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP and HTML.

This age was followed by a second phase, commonly called Web2, where a new infrastructure developed on top of this earlier layer around the social graph.

This social graph was almost exclusively controlled by the proprietary databases and algorithms of giant companies like Facebook.

But blockchain technology offered a way out of this impasse: using tokens, we could incentivise developers and early adopters to create new open protocols, while decentralising the ownership of new projects.

In this way, the value created would be shared by a much larger group of coders, designers and users – not just the shareholders of giant private corporations.

And that’s the real proposition of web3: it’s not about decentralisation, it’s about the tokenisation of value.