As Thanksgiving approaches, I know that I can expect one question from my family and friends: "What is it you do again?" It's part of working in tech, especially this corner that we call web3. But on the heels of the FTX implosion and the anti-crypto victory laps, I'm bracing for the much more pointed "Why are you working in crypto?" So I want to take this opportunity, before the wine is poured, to get ahead of a few things.

Let's start with the obvious. No, I don't work "at" Bitcoin. No, I don't own Dogecoin. Yes, I own an NFT. No, I have not bought a car by flipping an NFT. That might be the best place to start: that this isn't actually about the money.

Now, before you get too far ahead of yourself, this isn't a starry-eyed treatise on why money doesn't matter. In today's world, your relationship to money defines the level of freedom you experience, full stop. I want more money because it enables me to afford a home, to travel, to generally live the way I desire. My point is that I don't think the true promise of crypto is this hyper-financialized, money-grabbing facade that the bulk of the world sees today... although we will circle back to financial security eventually.

If you'll permit me, I'd like to take a quick historical detour. The world has gone through a series of radical changes in the past few hundred years. The first was the industrial revolution, which birthed mass production and factories. The second was globalization, which created the idea of vast, international markets. Sprinkle in the Internet, and we again leveled up the scale on which we operate. These changes have ushered in a new way of thinking about business. Prior to that, businesses were largely local, focused on quality and personal relationships. These changes have shifted the market landscape, creating the biggest opportunities for organizations that can master scale and efficiency.

A glance at the top companies by market cap highlights this reality: the most successful organizations all operate at a massive scale. The problem with rewarding scale is that it incentivizes companies to control services that more closely resemble utilities. YouTube controls what is essentially a digital video hosting utility, Facebook has a vice grip on social data hosting, and Amazon controls both a marketplace and a shipping utility (RIP USPS). Now I'm not taking anything away from those companies — they have built incredible services. But at a certain size your incentives become perverse: you can only grow by being "an everything store" or by gobbling up every part of your universe.

I'm also not saying that this hasn't produced benefit in our daily lives. Businesses built around pseudo-utilities are incredibly stable, and allow large numbers of people to enjoy steady jobs and the associated financial security. I also love the fact that I can order anything I need from my phone and have it in my hands tomorrow. But it does have its downsides. Massive corporations, for all their stability, tend to create "cog in the machine"-style jobs and the idea of the "daily grind". It also stifles creativity — companies that control scaled utilities are often best positioned to identify new opportunities and tax, stamp out, or buy the next big thing.

OK, what does this have to do with web3? Without getting too technical, the fundamental technologies of crypto allow us to build and orchestrate these high-scale services with better incentives. In web3, those services are called protocols and the incentives are tokens. Using code, you can design fair, transparent protocols that reward all the key players: developers receive tokens for building and maintaining the protocol, operators receive them for keeping the network running, and users can earn them for, well, using the service. And since all players own a stake of the protocol through the tokens, it's harder to change the rules of the network to favor one party. Admittedly there's a fair amount of jargon in those last few sentences, so let's use a couple hypothetical examples.

One of the most popular web2 business models is the two-sided marketplace. Uber is the classic example, where the business matches drivers (supply) with riders (demand). The team built a great business and an operational juggernaut, but at a certain size they had to extract value for their shareholders. This incentivizes them to provide less benefits to drivers, so that they can keep prices affordable but still take enough of a slice to keep their shareholders happy. In a protocol world, the shareholders (aka the token holders) are the drivers and riders, so the protocol only has to worry about finding an equitable price between two parties instead of also satisfying the middleman.

Now imagine that there was a protocol for shipping. Shipping rates would be determined by fair, transparent code — shipping standards could be set, anyone could see how supply and demand would change rates, and anyone with a token would have a say in how those standards and rates are determined. A small business owner could have access to the same shipping rates as a larger competitor, allowing them to compete on product quality instead of shipping costs. A town could pool its resources and create a shipping center — it becomes a source of jobs for the community and is easily able to plug its warehouse space into the shipping protocol as long as it maintains a certain service rating. A driver with a truck could become a self-employed entrepreneur, able to pick up shipments alongside any other certified shipper and to receive benefits from the protocol as long as they meet the protocol-set requirements for shipping times. Sure, someone could decide to create a shipping fleet and try to make more money, but in a world where the protocol ensures everyone receives the same rates those gains would be linear instead of exponential.

Call it boring, but this is what excites me about web3. Transforming our global-scale utilities from businesses into protocols enables us to capture the benefits without pushing us towards the humans-as-numbers and winner-take-all games of our current environment. From a pure economic standpoint, it's hard to see a platform-style business model that isn't at risk from protocols. The very nature of the design means that you don't have to pay large cuts to the market-making middleman (that third party just doesn't even exist), giving protocols a major pricing edge. This system also creates an enormous amount of flexibility in the job market. It doesn't mean that everyone has to become an entrepreneur, but it does allow smaller groups of people to participate in and reap the benefits of large networks without having to give in to rat race culture. It also doesn't prevent someone from making more money, but it does make it harder to use scale as a way to become ultra-rich.

None of this is a given. It's early, and entirely possible that this technology is twisted in another direction. It is also incredibly dependent upon our ability to coordinate. One of the reasons corporations have done so well is that top-down, command-and-control organizations allow you to move quickly and efficiently. But an important subplot in the web3 community is experimentation with decision-making — the same technology that is enabling these new protocol opportunities is also unlocking new types of governance and organizational structures. Just as important as the rapid development of blockchain-centered technology is the rapid evolution of decision-making structures on top of it. To me, this is the true promise of web3 — that we have the tools and opportunity to unlock a new, more human way of living and working. Not the memecoins. Not the money.

Now, please pass the turkey.