On this epside of DeFi Decoded, in light of the Facebook outage, Alex and Andrew dig into the promise and peril of Web3 - Can it actually solve these problems, or does it threaten to create a system that's just as fragile but more fragmented and thus harder to control.

For ten perilous (or blissful, depending on who you ask) hours on Monday October 4th, Facebook and all the Facebook branded apps went offline, exposing the centralized and surprisingly fragile nature of the Web.  

Despite the broadly positive innovations of the internet, we still rely on middlemen to perform many essential functions, such as maintaining internet infrastructure, moving, and storing value and data, verifying identities, and performing basic business logic like databasing, contracting and so forth. 

This is problematic for several reasons. Intermediaries are vulnerable to hacking or failure (as we saw with Facebook). Banks, social media companies and other intermediaries are gatekeepers that exclude many people. They also capture all the data and much of the value created online. That’s bad because it could violate our privacy but also because we don’t get to fully participate in what we create online. 

Blockchain promises a new era of the internet, dubbed Web3, which could solve many of these problems by giving us a way to move and store assets digitally and peer to peer. Blockchain gives us the tools, incentives and mechanisms to create value and organize capability though DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations, rather than centralized companies.

Web3 promises a fairer, more resilient, more transparent, more private, and more decentralized internet, financial services industry, and economy.