Will Gottsegen. Will Gottsegen is CoinDesk's media and culture reporter. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here. Enter application programming interfaces APIs : code libraries that offer handy shortcuts for pulling data from a given blockchain. MetaMask accomplishes this by making API calls to three companies that have consolidated in this space. Whatever Etherscan coughs up is then plugged into MetaMask. The same goes for OpenSea. To prove his point, Marlinspike minted an NFT that displays a different image depending on the server you view it from.
For some reason — Marlinspike said he never learned why — OpenSea took it down. OpenSea, a multibillion dollar private company, is within its rights to take down images, and does so fairly often.
The issue is that MetaMask, purportedly a non-custodial, censorship-resistant wallet controlled by its users, stopped displaying the NFT, too. The token was still on the blockchain, but MetaMask was scanning data only from OpenSea, as opposed to the blockchain itself. So as an experiment, I made an NFT that changes based on who is looking at it, since the web server that serves the image can choose to serve different images based on the IP or User Agent of the requester.
What I found most interesting, though, is that after OpenSea removed my NFT, it also no longer appeared in any crypto wallet on my device. This is web3, though, how is that possible? A wallet like MetaMask needs to do basic things like display your balance, your recent transactions, and your NFTs, as well as more complex things like constructing transactions, interacting with smart contracts, etc.
So like my dApp, MetaMask accomplishes this by making API calls to three companies that have consolidated in this space. Again, like with my dApp, these responses are not authenticated in some way. Rainbow, etc are set up in exactly the same way. Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1.
To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms. People who will run servers for you, and iterate on the new functionality that emerges. Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan. Likewise, the web3 protocols are slow to evolve. Iterating quickly on centralized platforms is already outpacing the distributed protocols and consolidating control into platforms.
I think this is very similar to the situation with email. Once a distributed ecosystem centralizes around a platform for convenience, it becomes the worst of both worlds: centralized control, but still distributed enough to become mired in time. However, even if this is just the beginning and it very well might be! This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer to the ideal outcome as the days become less early.
It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use. Payment fees by credit card, which typically feel extortionary, look cheap compared to that. OpenSea could even publish a simple transparency log if people wanted a public record of transactions, offers, bids, etc to verify their accounting. People have made money through cryptocurrency speculation, those people are interested in spending that cryptocurrency in ways that support their investment while offering additional returns, and so that defines the setting for the market of transfer of wealth.
The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment mechanics, but they care about where the money is. That opens the door to Coinbase managing the tokens themselves through dark pools that Coinbase holds, which helpfully eliminates the transaction fees and makes it possible to avoid having to interact with smart contracts at all.
Eventually, all the web3 parts are gone, and you have a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card. I think these market forces will likely continue, and in my mind the question of how long it continues is a question of whether the vast amounts of accumulated cryptocurrency are ultimately inside an engine or a leaky bucket.
If it churns out, then this will be a blip. I have only dipped my toe in the waters of web3.
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