Inside Crypto’s Plan to Retool the Internet

Crypto enthusiasts dream not only of revolutionizing money. They want to reinvent the World Wide Web, too. Their vision, which goes by the name Web3, is of a decentralized environment built on crypto technology in which swarms of independent collaborators take back control of the web from giant tech companies. It’s a threat that those tech firms -- including Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. and Twitter Inc. -- are taking seriously.

The idea is this: The early web was a way of remotely accessing static pages of text and images. In what became known as Web 2.0, users began to interact with one another -- chatting, sharing videos and buying stuff online. But they needed to coalesce around big platforms, and that led eventually to today’s landscape of huge corporations tracking people’s activity and monetizing the information via advertising. Web3 advocates -- many of them anti-establishment libertarians -- say it’s time to take back control from those gatekeepers and allow users to choose who can see and use their personal data.