Casey Newton: When did you first suspect that web3 might not, in fact, be going all that great?
Molly White: Towards the end of 2021 I started to see so much web3 hype, everywhere: on social media, in conversations with friends, in technical spaces, in the news. When I went to look up what “web3” even was, I found no end of articles talking about how one company or another was doing something with web3, or how some venture capital firm was setting up a web3 fund, or how all the problems with the current web were going to be solved by web3… but very few that would actually succinctly describe what the term even meant. This definitely set off the first alarm bells for me: it’s concerning to me when people are trying extremely hard to get people to buy in to some new idea but aren’t particularly willing (or even able) to describe what it is they’re doing. As I began to pay more attention to the space, I was seeing all of this hype for web3 with all these new projects, but so many of them were just absolutely terrible ideas when you got past the marketingspeak and veneer. Medical records on the blockchain! Fix publishing with NFTs! Build social networks on top of immutable databases! I started my Web3 is Going Great project after seeing a few particularly horrendous ideas, as well as after I began to notice just how frequently these hacks and scams were happening (with huge amounts of money involved).