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That's true for many crypto projects, but: 1) Many of the projects that failed weren't Web3 at all, such as Celsius, Voyager and FTX. In fact, the very thing that made them fail is that centralized entities took the money and invested it into assets that made them insolvent as soon as the assets lost value. True Web3 is about smart contracts which are designed exactly to prevent middlemen from exercising discretion. Uniswap is solvent and will always be. It's sad that the public conflates the two. 2) Just because someone creates an empty SPAC or shell company or tokens that don't have any utility, doesn't mean the mechanism for creating this stuff is useless. People also created tons of worthless personal websites with <blink> and <marquee> tags in the early days of the Web, and those were pretty worthless also, economically. But the actual technology behind it (HTTP 1 and 2, HTML 1 - 5, CSS, etc.) was very useful and has powered a ton of wealth for the world as soon as responsible businesses built business models on top of it (e.g. e-commerce, software as a service). Similarly, NFTs and so on are just first-generation technology, similar to games like Pong or Space Invaders. 3) In short, I wouldn't say the Web 1.0 is useless because personal home pages (where the PHP language gets its name) were largely useless gaudy things, or Web 2.0 was useless because Friendster and Myspace ultimately failed. If you want to see many examples of applications of Web3 that are useful, just click here: https://intercoin.org/applications 4) And finally, the very people who bought into "yields" and "trading" were essentially participating in zero-sum games where some people (e.g. early investors, or high-speed trading bots) take other people's money (e.g. later investors, or futures traders). It's like going to a casino hoping to beat a poker table, but being the fish. 5) And the entire advertising model over the long term has been in a race to the bottom because it is a zero-sum game too. That's why Google and Facebook (sorry, Alphabet and Meta) are down while, say, Apple and Verizon are not. |