Whenever a fresh disaster happens on the blockchain, increasingly I learn about it from the same destination: a two-month old website whose name suggests the deadpan comedy with which it chronicles the latest crises in NFTs, DAOs, and everything else happening in crypto.
Launched on December 14th, Web3 Is Going Just Great is the sort of thing you almost never see any more on the internet: a cool and funny new website. Its creator and sole author is Molly White, a software engineer and longtime Wikipedia contributor who combs through news and crypto sites to find the day’s most prominent scams, schemes, and rug pulls.
Organized as a timeline and presented in reverse chronological order, to browse Web3 Is Going Just Great is to get a sense of just how unusual an industry this is. This week alone, the site (W3IGG to its fans) has highlighted, among other things:
a DAO treasury that was drained in a “hostile takeover”
an NFT project falling apart amid accusations of rug pulling
Coinbase’s outage during the Super Bowl
Scrolling through the items tallies the actual costs of these issues to their victims: A “Grift Counter” in the bottom right corner adds up the value of all the losses to theft and scams that you’ve read about so far.
$8.4 billion in grift as of February 15th
More than 225,000 people have visited the site to date. It has been featured on Daring Fireball, among other places, and its Twitter account has quickly amassed nearly 23,000 followers.
By White’s own admission, W3IGG has “a strong bias against web3,” and people who are more enthusiastic about crypto may find its one-sided viewpoint unfair. But White’s dryly funny, almost clinical write-ups of crypto crises make it accessible even to open-minded skeptics like myself.
I asked White if she would be up for a conversation, and happily she agreed. We talked about the site’s origins, her favorite crypto catastrophe, and why she thinks giving people financial stakes in projects will not create a host of new Wikipedia-style projects, unlike what advocates of decentralization often claim.