Web3

Ownership Economy

Not pointing fingers, but let’s be real. We don’t really own anything on the internet today.

The internet’s largest conglomerates have captured unprecedented value while the broader community instrumental to their success have been locked out.

To be fair, the internet game was broken from the start. The economic incentives today just doesn’t work at scale because data = asset, but the most valuable contributors of said data — users & early adopters — are almost always left out.

This dynamic changes in web3. Decentralized architecture coupled with smart contracts can coordinate cooperative economic models to address this in ways previously unimagined. It becomes feasible to distribute ownership at the scale required to reward every user who participates in value creation.

We’ve already seen this with Ethereum — the first multi-billion dollar internet scale network. You own $ETH, therefore you own part of the network. We are now starting to see this translate into applications. Take Axie Infinity and Audius for example.

Tokenomics

While it is technically possible for companies to distribute ownership to users in the form of stock grants, the current legal & financial landscape make this infeasible. This is where tokens come to play. A token is just like a stock, except it is built natively for the web. An ownership of token represents ownership of the network it powers. And nobody can take it away from you.

While it’s still early — we can start to imagine a world in which we get paid to use products like Instagram. As a user who contributes data (asset), we get to own the Instagram network much like an early employee or investor based on our contributions to the network (posting great content). As a builder, this model allows us to incentivize users to join and stick around. It’s akin to attracting the best employees to join through stock options. Web3 starts to blur the line between users and employees as the decentralized model doesn’t care for the distinction. It will simply reward ownership based on contributions made to the network.