One of the few upsides of the current crypto/NFT bubble bursting is the daily schadenfreude I receive involving each ridiculous Web3 debacle. Oh, the NFT you spent $2.9 million on is now worth $29? You can’t withdraw funds from your crypto exchange? What a shame.
Putting all this bad news together in one fantastic doomscroll is Molly White, a software engineer who runs @web3isgreat, a cheekily monikered Twitter account (and corresponding website Web3 Is Going Just Great) with 95,000+ followers that chronicles “only some of the many disasters happening in crypto, defi, NFTs, and other blockchain-based projects.”
“I hold no cryptocurrencies or NFTs, make no money off this website, and am also not trying to make money off of crypto markets doing poorly,” she notes. So consider this a personal project.
In theory, Web3 is interesting and represents a possible future path for the online world. But the space is currently chock-full of bankruptcies, scams and nebulous marketing. And @web3isgreat is simply the best way to keep track of the latest failures of the decentralized web’s growing pains. (White’s website is actually entitled “Web3 is going just great…and is definitely not an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.” It also features an ongoing “grift counter” that speculates on the amount of money lost to Web3 scams.)
Among recent @web3isgreat highlights, we have yet another cryptocurrency exchange “pausing” withdrawals:
A crypto investment firm lost 99% of its customers’ funds:
And a “multi-chain console for Web3 gaming” that was eviscerated for its fraudulent claims:
Note that those are just three news nuggets that took place over a 24-hour period this week.
While Web3 has its proponents, Smith seems happy to call it a grift. “One of the most distinguishing features of ‘web3’ is the sheer level of handwaviness surrounding it,” she writes. “While you can find no end of press releases, crypto evangelists on Twitter, and venture capitalists extolling the virtues of web3, you will have a much harder time finding any definition that’s not so full of buzzwords that it becomes meaningless.”
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