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The August 2022 edition of Fortune magazine exhibited the pinched-lipped grin of a young man, above the caption: “The next Warren Buffett?” Then at the head of FTX, one of the most ‘reputable’ crypto exchanges, the young man is presently serving a 25 year prison sentence. For persons involved in this peculiar field of human activity, his name will usually trigger a smirk (alternatively, a shudder, if you’re one of the defrauded hundreds of thousands). To those unfamiliar with blockchain technology, or plainly ignorant of the existence of the web’s third age, Samuel Bankman-Fried is already just about as fresh as Lonesome Rhodes. Mainstream media coverage of crypto ebbs and flows, but it rarely takes centre stage. Events surrounding Donald Trump’s reinstatement as president of the USA briefly propelled it into the spotlight, in a typically crude manner. Admittedly, blockchain technology and its diverse applications cannot be reduced to the attention-grabbing antics of pump-and-dump pundits lurking behind meme coins $Trump, $Melania or $Libra – nor to Bitcoin’s latest ‘all-time-high’. And it may initially be confusing to ponder how the initials of Elon Musk’s ‘department of government efficiency’ borrow the name of a cryptocurrency launched in December 2013, which began as a joke – ‘a lighthearted alternative to Bitcoin’, based on the popular Doge meme, featuring a Shiba Inu dog with broken English captions like “such wow”, “very coin” and “much money”. As any unintelligent chatbot would inform you, this asset has since grown into a ‘popular investment’, at least in part ‘thanks to’ publicity provided by Musk himself – with sagacious tweets like “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto” or indeed the brief replacement of his newly acquired micro-blogging network’s iconic blue bird by the Dogecoin logo (a move that led to a 38% surge in its price). Over the past few years, the billionaire has inspired similar rises in valuation, for instance when referencing the Milady collection, anime-inspired profile picture NFTs minted on the Ethereum blockchain, created by the Remilia Collective (whose founder, Charlotte Fang, has engaged in ‘shock-posting’ and ‘ironic extremism’ on Twitter and 4chan, using racist and misogynistic themes).

Such shenanigans should not make us forget that the current U.S. administration shows enthusiasm, even some reverence, for the realm of cryptocurrencies and their seemingly magical ability to create value. Consider the momentous decision to establish a ‘Strategic Bitcoin Reserve’ and a ‘U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile’. Or the full and unconditional pardon granted by Donald Trump, two days after his inauguration, to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, a dark web marketplace where Bitcoin found one of its first use cases in the early 2010s – drug transactions. What our favourite mitten and parka sporting socialist names the “new oligarchy” has shown a definite interest in crypto, yet it’s somewhat unlikely that it would endorse the mantra of decentralisation dear to many Web3 players. In December 2021, Elon Musk tweeted “I’m not suggesting web3 is real – seems more marketing buzzword than reality right now” and “Has anyone seen web3? I can’t find it”. His ironic stance contrasts with the fervour of one of Ethereum’s co-founders, Gavin Wood, who coined the term Web3 and defined it as “a zero-trust interaction system” (Wood, 2014), a decentralised internet based on blockchain technology, enabling users to remove reliance on trusted third parties (such as B**ig Tech companies, precisely). In 2021, Wood went as far as to state: “Web3 is actually much more of a larger sociopolitical movement that is moving away from arbitrary authorities into a much more rationally based liberal model. And this is the only way I can see of safeguarding the liberal world, the life that we have come to enjoy over the last 70 years.” (Wood, 2021). To further confuse novices, two apparently contradicting narratives have been spun and circulated in mainstream media, around this phenomenon; on the one hand, the tale of a technology that is inherently driven by far-right, libertarian ideologues that seek to undermine government institutions and financial regulations, and whose ultimate goal is the dismantling of democratic politics (Golumbia, 2016; Hadjadji, 2023); on the other hand the account of an Internet finally living up to the emancipatory promises of its inception, and embodying the collaborative dream that Web 2.0 promised and failed to deliver (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2016; De Filippi & Wright, 2018; Dixon, 2025).

To make some sense out of these conflicting versions, let’s consider what the discourse of Web3 contributes to the current, admittedly sombre, political zeitgeist. In what key forms do the contradictions at the very heart of these players’ experiences and ‘productive activities’ crystallise? The research that this analysis is based upon has been carried out primarily by means of interviews, with over sixty Web3 players, in five different countries during the past two years¹. Discussing their activity, the ventures and projects that they’ve taken part in, these interviews explored how they envision the creation of value(s), as well as their perceptions of contemporary capitalism as a moment of crisis or opportunity, and their own positions within wider relations of production. The majority of the persons interviewed had strong ties to the fields of culture and artistic production, media and communication networks, data management; it is ‘upon’ these areas of activity that they have attempted – or envisage – setting up blockchain-enabled applications and platforms, although these services rarely account for the bulk of their income, even in cases where the products are running. Almost all of them were between twenty and thirty years of age. Another specificity of this group is that a significant proportion do not operate this activity within incorporated structures. Just under half of our interviewees hold positions (often waged labour) in wholly other fields of activity or maintain employment in existing Big Tech or Web 2.0 styled structures. Most participants engage in Web3 activity through informal sociabilities, groups of two, three, five or at most a dozen individuals often based in separate geographical locations, different countries and time zones – and in several cases composed of persons who had never physically met. For those who have set up registered companies, it is notable that they consider themselves – and indeed appear to be as yet – positioned on the fringes of existing sub-sectors of the industries which their Web3 activity is targeting, often bearing the stance of the ‘outsider’, the ‘underdog’, despite cultivating partnerships and actively collaborating with established industry players, as we shall see. Lastly, it is worth mentioning that over four fifths of our interviewees were white, male individuals, almost all had pursued higher education, and all were living in metropolitan cities.

¹: See annex for full list of participants.