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It comes of no surprise that crypto-assets are perceived as a vehicle for personal enrichment. Somewhat more intriguing is however the extent to which the ‘small hands’ of Web3 idealistically associate personal growth and fulfilment with their own belonging to small-scale ‘communities.’ This vision is evident in the declaration of a San Francisco based Web3 product manager: “I think blockchain empowers smaller groups (…) and that’s not to get political, but blockchain will allow for, I think, quality of life to come back and people to have more autonomy over their lives.” (i23). Blockchain players are, at times, perceived as a movement per se, although references are more frequently made to seemingly grass-roots associations, in opposition to the corporate/platform aggregated communities of Web 2.0. Another respondent enthusiastically summed it up in these terms: “If you try to relate it back to the big picture, it’s all about values of a community; it’s essentially a community that’s working based on certain values.” (i57). Again, the vision of flourishing within small, close-knit sociabilities was vividly articulated by this Web3 film entrepreneur interviewed at SXSW festival: “One thing I can take away from being in the space for two years, it's not the technology and not the NFTs and not making money or fame or any of that stuff (...), but the friends and the community and the people that I've met.” (i45). Several participants highlighted the unique opportunities Web3 offered to unite and oversee dedicated groups: “For me, blockchain was this really nice, transparent solution to start building things on (…) and to be able to manage communities and (…) figure out ways to bring that together for different use cases, whether you're an artist, whether you're a marketer, whether you're selling a product or classes, education, all kinds of stuff.” (i18). Moreover, these affiliations often include blockchain enthusiasts from countries of the Global South, for whom this activity is represented as a boon: “I've seen many artists from Africa able to make insane amounts of money through digital art and have opportunities that would never have occurred if they weren't on Web3.” (i15) The use of NFTs & crypto-assets was seen as particularly beneficial for socially disadvantaged groups and marginalised populations all over the world. One interviewee summed this up: “Everyone has something to bring to the space, because there’s no, like, prejudgments that we have in regular society, because it’s people all over the world.” (i7)

A striking mix of individualism and an ostensibly collectivist ethos emerges, as articulated by the founder of a New York based Web3 content monetisation platform: “A lot of crypto is that kind of very interesting mix between on one side, something extremely libertarian like my coins, my crypto, kind of idea, while at the same time extremely collectivist, as nobody owns it outside of the, like, proletariat owning the network” (i29). This seemingly paradoxical aspect of the ideological appeal combines personal entrepreneurial empowerment, community building, and the mission to deliver “utility to people, wherever you lie on the spectrum regarding capitalism” (i18). Another blockchain entrepreneur based in northern Italy underlined: “I don't really see a distinction: (…) to help the individual, you ultimately help the community.” (i48). A group of NFT entrepreneurs interviewed during a professional event in Amsterdam spoke of “simple” or “little” use cases such as placing one hundred dollars worth of NFTs in a multi-signature vault: “We can buy some pictures of artists, we’re sitting here, or somewhere else, (...) we talk about the pictures and about the connection with the group.” (i60). Here we can see how the feeling of belonging to a small group is supported up by this shared monetary value – a belief echoed by this comment from a Swiss Web3 developer:

“This industry has a more a sense of community, more a sense of belonging, more sense of purpose. Of course, at the end of the day, some companies, they just want money and that's it. At the end of the day, you have to profit, you have to survive. But if you look at this industry, there's a lot of idealists and, and guys with purpose; it goes a bit beyond money.” (i50).

Despite the buoyant overtones, there is a deeper knowledge that financial incentives objectively divide these small groups just as well as they apparently bind them. One older Switzerland based entrepreneur, who had worked extensively on a blockchain based tool for deliberative decision-making, humorously complained that the majority of people in the ‘Web3 space’ were not interested in the subtleties of democratic governance of actual communities: “They believe they can get rich very quickly, you know, (...) all that sort of bullshit thing, you know, how many young people, like myself in the past, feel entitled and smarter than anyone else.” (i54). This view was amplified by the founder of a New York based music distribution network:

“We think that in an ideal world, those artists that are contributing value to us on the platform can actually have a stake in the ownership of the platform. But as far as how that works, practically… I think there are still a lot of things to work out with how it works in practice: (…) governance apathy is a huge problem. A lot of people can own tokens and what happens is people like to speculate on them, but they don't actually use them, in sort of like ownership sense, in a governance sense.” (i28).

Others pointed implicitly to the fact that purportedly horizontal, group based sociabilities were inherently tied to exclusionary practices such as “first come first win” Ponzi schemes, and high technical (and jargon) barriers to new entrants. One California based Web3 entrepreneur developing an archive and data storage platform acknowledged:

“In a decentralized network, you have to assume every other participant is a potential adversary. (…) With the decentralized network, you have to assume that all of the things you're synchronizing with are evil” (i24).

The predatory strategies of many blockchain players were widely recognised: “I think crypto is ripe of these sort of influencer types who will, basically, work in the shadows, drive certain narratives and then burn their followers and try to kind of siphon off all the garbage they create along the way to honest contributors to a project.” (i53). It is somewhat comical that this statement came from an entrepreneur whose flagship product consists of individualised AI agents designed precisely to optimise speculation on crypto assets. Working in Web3 was equated by many participants to negotiating a threatening space, populated by a significant number (if not a majority) of players perceived as perverse – waiting for any opportunity to ‘screw you’ – purely speculative agents such as ‘token farmers’ using bots to make rapid gains and outdo more candid newcomers or Web3 ‘believers’. Moreover, the instability due to the rapidly evolving regulatory framework, the constant threat of SEC investigations, were referred to as factors contributing to the ubiquitous ‘FUD’ (fear, uncertainty, doubt), not to mention the inherent anguish of losing one’s wallet keys, of being hacked, etc. The term ‘predatory’ was used by several respondents to describe this environment, and one declared that losing money to a phishing website or sending crypto to a false address was “like a rite of passage” (i28). Research has shown how risks are magnified for historically marginalised groups such as Black people in the USA; these last have been particularly hardly hit in market downturns, echoing past generational financial trauma (CRADL, 2022: 59-76). Moreover, “awareness of Black people’s enthusiasm for alternative financial tools has incentivized predatory behavior” from some players, with specific speculative products have targeting Black communities with advertising (Ibid.: 72).

Beyond the discourse of community solidarities, the celebration – and spectre – of individual enrichment looms in the form of an interpellation. This echoes one of the key findings that Arnaud Esquerre and Luc Boltanski make, with regard to what they choose to name “the economy of enrichment”: it addresses people universally “as if they were rich, or, at the very least, richer than they actually are.” (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2017: 48)¹ As we have concluded elsewhere, Web3 discourse magnifies to a certain degree the general ideological evolution of Western capitalism, attempting to balance contradictory narratives between a communal ethos – collaboration, diversity, inclusiveness – and individual wealth building practices, which are de facto promoting competition, exclusion and risk, with amplified effects for working class, minority groups and non-Western populations (Karatzogianni, Matthews & Patsiaouras, forthcoming). Without delving, at this juncture, into the ‘utopian’ character of this blending of individualistic financial prosperity and small communalist attachments, one might therefore reflect on the argument presented by Tim Corbalis and Max Soar, with regard to the idealistic promises of a digital organisation Colony (whose white paper they analysed):

“In this utopia, not only can technical solutions enable a fully efficient and all-pervading market, but they do so by freeing organizations from the restrictions of explicitly social forms of coordination, accountability, and human interpretation. This is reminiscent of early utopian visions of the Internet that saw the technology as enabling a digital community free of state bureaucracy as well as social contexts of race, gender, and class. Within this frame, the blockchain offers a form of technological solutionism (...) that, by stripping out social elements of organization, envisions a totally individualized subject participating directly in the market (…).” (Corballis & Soar, 2022: 4)

In their article ‘Building Blockchain Frontiers: Ethereum as an Extension of the Californian Ideology’, Ann Brody, Tamara Kneese and Julie Frizzo-Barker place the social dynamics of blockchain activists in a broader perspective, regarding the “long history that combines the ideology of rugged individualism with communitarian values, thereby overlooking socioeconomic inequalities” (Brody et al., 2023: 4163):

“In the same way that frontier imaginaries masked the dispossession and genocide of Native Americans, Internet-based frontier imaginaries overlook the material infrastructures, environmental impact, and globalized and precarious labor conditions that produce digital technologies. This trope of tension between the communalist spirit and rugged individualism returns repeatedly in both fiction and writings about networked technologies and in leading figures’ entrepreneurial visions.” (Ibid.: 4166)<>

One might consider, for the while, how this “trope of tension” affords a reoccurring discursive juxtaposition, effectively eluding the question of socio-economic relations – or to be more precise, the positioning of these players within broader material relations of production – and stripping these down to the wick of communal ‘ties’, in which the naturalisation of hierarchies and inequalities goes hand in hand with the mantra of decentralisation.

¹: This and all following translations of books cited in French or German are mine.