Yes — Web3 is the future
Debate Rules
AI scores every argument. Team with higher total wins. Stronger arguments bring more points. Pick your side, share your argument and help your team win.
Debate topic:
Is Web3 still a relevant concept after everything that happened?
No — it was mostly hype
Yes — Web3 is the future Team
No — it was mostly hype Team
Debate Rules
AI scores every argument. Team with higher total wins. Stronger arguments bring more points. Pick your side, share your argument and help your team win.
Yes — Web3 is the future
The Web3 concept — decentralised protocols that don't require trusting a central intermediary — is responding to a real problem that hasn't been solved. Web2 produced a world where five companies control most of the world's information infrastructure. Your data, your identity, your social graph, your financial history all belong to platforms that can deplatform you, sell your data, change their terms at any time, and have no accountability mechanism beyond PR pressure. The problems with centralised internet infrastructure are structural and growing. Blockchain-based alternatives to specific pieces of that infrastructure are imperfect but real. Uniswap processes billions in trades without a company behind it. ENS domains give people human-readable blockchain identities they own. These solve specific problems. The hype cycle collapsed but the problems remain.
The 2022 crash was the Web3 equivalent of the 2000 dot-com crash. Pets.com died. Amazon survived. Many fraudulent and badly conceived Web3 projects are gone. The infrastructure — Ethereum, Layer 2 networks, cross-chain bridges, DeFi primitives — is still being developed and improved. Institutional adoption (BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street) is accelerating precisely because the speculative froth has cleared and the actual technology is visible. The concept survived the hype cycle.
defi still runs. uniswap processes more volume than many regulated exchanges. the infrastructure doesn't care about the narrative.
The 'Web3 is dead' take conflates a bear market with a technology failure. The internet's core protocols didn't disappear when dot-com companies went bankrupt. DeFi TVL hit $170 billion in 2021 and has maintained multi-tens-of-billions through the bear cycle. Ethereum processes $1 billion+ daily in stablecoin transfers. Institutional custody services, tokenized Treasuries, and on-chain RWA (real-world assets) are growing. The speculative casino is deflating. The financial infrastructure layer is quietly maturing.
No — it was mostly hype
Web3's core promise was user ownership and decentralisation. The actual product delivered was a new set of intermediaries (exchanges, wallet companies, L2 operators, bridge protocols) with no regulatory protection for users and vastly higher complexity. FTX wasn't an anomaly — it was the natural outcome of building financial infrastructure without consumer protection frameworks. Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager — the 2022 cascade showed that Web3 reproduced every vulnerability of traditional finance while removing the safety nets. More fundamentally: the 'not your keys not your coins' maximalism meant real people lost real savings to hacks, rug pulls, and protocol failures with zero recourse. The decentralisation that Web3 promised requires technical sophistication to access safely. The majority of actual Web3 users interacted with it through centralised on-ramps that turned out to be fraudulent. The gap between the ideological pitch and the operational reality was catastrophic and predictable.
Show me a Web3 application that 100 million normal people use for something other than speculation. Signal has 40 million users for private messaging. Wikipedia has billions of readers. Venmo processes billions in payments. Where is the Web3 equivalent for a non-speculative use case? Until there is one, Web3 is infrastructure that doesn't yet have a product.
The rebranding problem is real. 'Web3' became so associated with scams, rug pulls, and celebrity NFTs that the label itself now creates friction for legitimate builders. Projects working on verifiable credentials, decentralised identity, or private payment infrastructure are actively avoiding the Web3 label because of the reputational contamination. When the brand becomes a liability, the concept — whatever remains of it — has to start over without the name. That's not recovery. That's a reboot.