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In 2014, there was a vision: you can have permissionless, decentralized applications that could support finance, social media, ride sharing, governing organizations, crowdfunding, potentially create an entire alternative web, all on the backs of a suite of technologies.
Ethereum: the blockchain. The world computer that could give any application its shared memory.
Whisper: the data layer. Messages too expensive for a blockchain, that do no need consensus.
Swarm: the storage layer. Store files for long-term access.
Over the last five years, this core vision has at times become obscured, with various "metas" and "narratives" at various times taking center stage. But the core vision has never died. And in fact, the core technologies behind it are only growing stronger.
Ethereum is now proof of stake. Ethereum is now scaling, it is now cheap, and it is on track to get more scalable and cheaper thanks to the power of ZK-EVMs. Thanks to ZK-EVM + PeerDAS, the "sharding" vision is effectively being realized. And L2s can give additional and different kinds of gains in speed on top.
Whisper is now Waku ( docs.waku.org ), and already powers many applications (eg. railway.xyz, status.app just to name two I use). Even outside of Waku, the quality of decentralized messaging has increased. Fileverse (decentralized Google Docs and Sheets alternative: fileverse.io ) has seen massive gains in usability over the past year.
IPFS is now highly performant and robust as a decentralized way of retrieving files, though IPFS alone does not solve the storage problem. Hence, there is still room to improve there.
All of the prerequisites for the original web3 vision are here, in full force, and are continuing to get stronger over the next few years. Hence, it's time to buidl, and buidl decentralized.
Fileverse is an excellent example of the right way to do things:
* It uses Ethereum and Gnosis Chain for what they are good for: names, accounts and permissioning, document registration
* It uses decentralized messaging and file storage to store documents and propagate changes to documents
* The application passes the walkaway test: github.com/fileverse/walk… (even if Fileverse disappears, you can still retrieve them and even keep editing them with the open source UI)
This is what we mean by "build a hammer that is a tool you buy once and it's yours, not a corposlop AI dishwasher that requires you to register for a google account and charges a subscription fee per month for extra washing modes, and probably spies on you and stops working if you get politically disfavored by a foreign country".
If you think this criticism of corposlop is hyperbolic, well turns out, it's literally a concatenation of these three:
* mein-mmo.de/en/user-buys-n…
* theguardian.com/technology/202…
* irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/…
In 2014, decentralized applications were toys, hundreds of times more difficult to use in web2. In 2026, fileverse is now usable enough that I regularly write documents in it and send them to other people to collaborate. The decentralized renaissance is coming, and you can be part of making it happen.
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