Investors may have viewed Web 3.0 as a unique iteration of the internet that has brought investment opportunities to traders that were once fenced out from market participation. But Evan Cheng, co-founder and chief of Web3 infrastructure startup Mysten Labs, says this decentralized version of the internet is “more than that.” 

Evan Cheng: What’s the spirit behind Web3? People understand intuitively, you wrap things in a token, they can be easily transferred between parties. It’s great for financial products, but Web3 is much more than that. It really is about getting the internet back to a more fair, open and peer-to-peer interaction model. We moved away from that. 

If you look at the internet, incumbents today build on the work of users. User-generated content is the basis behind Instagram, Facebook, Twitter [and] YouTube… These big incumbents control distribution, and they profit. They squeeze a lot of profit out of it. Even more so, it’s about transparency and the lack of fairness. So that’s where we need to get back to. Understand that, then you understand the ethos of Web3.