Web3 Promised Freedom—So Why Are We Still Trapped?
Swarm Foundation President and architect of Ethereum Swarm, a decentralized storage infrastructure for a self-sovereign digital society.
One morning in 2010, the future arrived not with a bang but a freeze. Wikileaks, the whistleblowing platform that, depending on whom you asked, either exposed war crimes or endangered national security, found itself financially paralyzed. No court order, no charges, not even a press release. Just a quiet blockade, as Visa, Mastercard and PayPal severed access to its donations. Without legal recourse, Wikileaks was silenced by infrastructure.
In the aftermath, something else stirred. Bitcoin, then a fringe idea, offered a glimpse of resistance: a currency that didn't need permission, couldn't be blocked and ran beyond the reach of gatekeepers. What began as an experiment soon evolved into a broader vision—an internet without chokepoints, where value and information could flow freely.
Over the next decade, a decentralized movement took shape, from blockchains and smart contracts to NFTs, DAOs and decentralized finance protocols. These weren't just new tools; they were a rejection of the surveillance capitalism that had come to define Web2.
As explored in earlier installments of this series, the internet's shift from open protocols to closed platforms eroded user autonomy and transformed individuals from creators into commodities, their data endlessly extracted, analyzed and monetized. Web3 promised to reverse that trajectory. But as decentralization gains momentum, a quieter question emerges: What if we've rebuilt the old architecture with the same dependencies?
For all its boldness, the Web3 stack still leans on the bones of its predecessor. Applications run on centralized APIs, wallets rely on cloud infrastructure, and network attacks can still compromise access to unstoppable applications. This piece further explores the unfinished business of decentralization—not just as a technical challenge but as a deeper reckoning with the foundations we've inherited and the future we hope to build.
The Unravelling Of A Privacy Utopia
On a rainy August morning in Amsterdam, a 29-year-old developer was led away in handcuffs. His alleged crime? Writing code. Not malware, just a tool called Tornado Cash, one of Ethereum's most used privacy protocols. Tornado allowed users to deposit crypto into a shared pool, and when they withdrew, the link between sender and recipient was cryptographically obscured.
A freelancer could keep earnings private. A whistleblower might shield a donation. Even Ethereum's founder, Vitalik Buterin, used it to donate to Ukraine, protecting recipients from retaliation. But on August 8, 2022, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned the protocol, alleging it laundered billions in stolen funds, including crypto tied to North Korea.
Just like that, the walls closed in.
Within hours, the infrastructure buckled.
Infura and Alchemy blocked access. Circle froze $75,000 in USDC. GitHub erased the code. MetaMask, which relies on Infura, returned errors to anyone trying to use Tornado. What had been built as unstoppable was suddenly inaccessible—not from a hack but from legal pressure.
The Infrastructure We Forgot To Decentralize
But Tornado wasn't a one-off—it revealed a deeper fragility. Web3 blockchains may be decentralized, but the systems around them often aren't. Access still depends on centralized internet protocols.
DNS, which maps domains to servers, is controlled by central authorities. BGP, which routes data between providers, can be hijacked. In July 2022, users of dApps on Polygon and Fantom were served phishing prompts via a DNS attack. The chain was untouched, but the interface was swapped. Weeks later, a BGP hijack hit Celer Bridge, rerouting users to a fake front end. Instantly, $235,000 vanished—not from smart contract flaws but from internet-level exploits. The chain didn't lie, but it couldn't protect what wasn't on-chain.
Applications face the same risks. Most users rely on wallets and dApps powered by cloud services like Infura, the default backend for MetaMask. In 2020, an Infura outage disrupted Ethereum. In 2022, a sanctions filter misfire caused MetaMask to block access in Venezuela. The decentralized stack failed at its centralized chokepoint.
The NFT That Became A Poop Emoji
Even NFTs, the poster child of digital permanence, are vulnerable to the same sleight of hand.
When Moxie Marlinspike, cryptographer and creator of Signal, minted an NFT in 2022, it came with a twist. On the NFT marketplace OpenSea, it showed one image; on Rarible, another; and in his wallet, it became a poop emoji.
The experiment exposed how NFT data storage isn't as decentralized as the philosophy suggests. Why? Most NFTs don't store content on-chain—they store pointers to the images as URLs. Web2 URLs resolve to a specific server, and since Moxie controlled the server, he could change the image at will.
The punchline? When OpenSea delisted the NFT, it vanished from Moxie's wallet, too, because wallets like MetaMask pull data from OpenSea's API. If OpenSea didn't list it, it effectively didn't exist.
As Moxie wrote: 'It doesn't functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain … the wallet is just using the OpenSea API.'
Decentralized storage networks exist to mitigate this problem by spreading files across many nodes. But unless data is truly replicated widely, availability still hinges on just a few custodians. Ownership may be decentralized, but visibility depends on centralized infrastructure.
Decentralizing The Full Stack
Web3 still runs on rails it doesn't control. DNS is attackable. Front ends sit on cloud servers. Wallets rely on APIs. RPCs become chokepoints. And when governments or attackers apply pressure, they fold.
To be fair, decentralization is hard. It's slow, expensive and still too technical. Many projects reach for shortcuts: a centralized server here, a hosted front end there. It works—until it doesn't.
Yet there's momentum. Across the ecosystem, developers, researchers and communities are working to rebuild foundations: rethinking storage, improving infrastructure, exploring new privacy approaches and serving front ends in a way that they cannot be tampered with or blinked off with a DNS edit or routing attack.
But we're not there yet. Web3 remains deeply entangled with Web2. Unless we peel it back layer by layer, from front end to routing to RPC, we're still building freedom on fragile ground. Decentralization isn't real until it touches every layer.
For now, Web3 is a dream under construction in search of solid ground.
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