7. The Etymology and Intellectual History of "Web3"

This chapter establishes something that the rest of the book will repeatedly lean on: the word "Web3" does not have a single, settled meaning, and its history is not a tidy line. The term was coined in a precise place and time — a 2014 blog post by the computer scientist Gavin Wood — yet it collides with an older, unrelated use of almost the same words by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web; it draws its emotional and political charge from a movement of 1990s privacy activists called the cypherpunks; and it was then stretched, marketed, and partly hollowed out across two speculative booms. To understand "what Web3 is," one must first understand that the question is partly a question about a word whose history is contested. That contestation is not a distraction from the answer; it is part of the answer.

A word with a birthday

Most technical terms accrete slowly, and we cannot say who first uttered them. "Web3" is unusual: it has a documented author, a documented date, and a documented founding text. The Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood introduced the modern, blockchain-centred meaning of the term in a blog post titled "ÐApps: What Web 3.0 Looks Like," published on 17 April 2014 on his blog Insights into a Modern World (Wood, 2014). The post appeared shortly after the Ethereum project — the programmable blockchain Wood helped build, discussed in detail in Chapter 13, Ethereum and Smart Contracts — had been announced, and it reads less as a product description than as a manifesto for a different kind of internet.

In plain terms: unlike most buzzwords, "Web3" can be traced to one person, one essay, and one day. Knowing that origin matters, because what the word was originally meant to do is quite specific — and quite different from what it later came to mean in marketing.

The oddity in the title deserves a note. The character "Ð" (a capital "eth," borrowed from Old English and Icelandic) was an early stylistic flourish in the Ethereum community for the word "decentralised." A ÐApp, or dApp, is short for decentralised application — that is, a piece of software that runs not on a company's servers but across a distributed network of computers that no single party controls.

In plain terms: an ordinary app, such as a banking app, ultimately runs on computers the bank owns; if the bank switches them off, the app dies. A "decentralised application" is designed so that no single owner can switch it off, because it runs on a shared network rather than on one organisation's machines. The analogy is imperfect — in practice many "dApps" still depend on conventional company infrastructure, a tension we will return to — but the aspiration is the key point here.

Wood's argument: a "zero-trust" web

To grasp what Wood meant by "Web 3.0," one has to grasp the problem he was reacting to. His essay appeared less than a year after the 2013 disclosures by Edward Snowden about mass state surveillance, and that context saturates the text. Wood's central claim was blunt: in light of what we had learned about how institutions handle our information, "entrusting our information to organisations in general is a fundamentally broken model" (Wood, 2014).

From that premise he drew a design conclusion. Rather than build systems in which we hope that the company or government holding our data behaves well, we should build systems engineered so that good behaviour is guaranteed by mathematics rather than by promises. Wood framed the goal as a zero-trust interaction system — describing Web 3.0 as "a reimagination of the sorts of things that we already use the Web for, but with a fundamentally different model for the interactions between parties," motivated by an "increasing need for a zero-trust interaction system" (Wood, 2014).

A zero-trust system, in this sense, is one designed so that you do not have to trust the people or companies you interact with — and they do not have to trust you — because the rules are enforced automatically by code and cryptography. The everyday analogy is a vending machine versus a market stall: at the stall you must trust the seller to hand over the goods after you pay; the vending machine, by contrast, is built so the exchange either completes for both sides or not at all. The analogy breaks down in that real systems still depend on trust in the people who wrote the code and built the machine — a gap critics press hard, and which we examine in Chapter 29, Critiques and Skepticism.

Wood paired this with a memorable design rule for how to treat different kinds of information. As he put it, the system should sort data by the assumption we make about it: "Information that we assume to be public, we publish. Information that we assume to be agreed, we place on a consensus-ledger. Information that we assume to be private, we keep secret and never reveal." All interactions, he wrote, would be carried out "pseudonymously, securely and ... trustlessly" (Wood, 2014).

The phrase "consensus-ledger" points to the technical heart of the proposal. A consensus ledger is a shared record-book that many independent computers agree on without any one of them being in charge — the blockchain, examined in Chapter 11, The Blockchain. But notice what this three-way sorting of information is for: it returns to the individual the decision about what to expose, what to commit to a public record, and what to withhold absolutely. That is the seed of what Wood and later advocates call self-sovereignty — the principle that a person, not a platform, should control their own identity, data, and value. Read this way, the consensus-ledger is a means, and self-sovereignty is the end it serves.

Wood's later, pithier slogan for the whole project, from his 2018 essay "Why We Need Web 3.0," was that it should deliver "less trust, more truth": a peer-to-peer web with "no servers and no authorities to manage the flow of information," allowing people to interact "in mutually beneficial ways ... without needing to trust each other" (Wood, 2018). By 2022 he had crystallised both the slogan and its purpose. Explaining the term to CNBC on its tenth anniversary, Wood stressed that he uses "trust" in a special sense — belief or faith without evidence — and that the aim is to need less of it and rely instead on verifiable truth; Web3, he said, is about "privacy, self-sovereignty and transparency," and he contrasted it pointedly with artificial intelligence, which in his framing moves us in the opposite direction, toward "less truth, more trust" (Wood, 2022). The watchword, then, is not anti-trust for its own sake but a demand that what we are asked to take on faith be replaced, wherever possible, with what we can check.

In plain terms: Wood's Web3 was not, at first, about getting rich on tokens or owning digital pictures. It was a security-and-politics argument: because we have learned we cannot reliably trust the institutions that hold our data, we should re-engineer the web so that we need to trust them less. Everything else — ownership, decentralisation, the economics — follows from that root idea.

The four components

Wood did not leave Web 3.0 as a slogan. He specified an architecture of four components — in his own compressed phrasing, "static content publication, dynamic messages, trustless transactions and an integrated user-interface" (Wood, 2014) — each meant to replace a function that, in the existing web, is performed by a trusted company:

1. A decentralised, encrypted static-content publication system. This is a way of storing and serving fixed content — pages, images, files — addressed not by where it lives (a web address pointing to a particular company's server) but by what it is (a cryptographic fingerprint of the content itself). Wood compared this to the "magnet links" of the BitTorrent file-sharing network. The technical name is content addressing: instead of asking "fetch the file at this location," you ask "fetch the file whose fingerprint is this." We treat this idea fully in Chapter 23, Decentralized Storage and Computation.

   In plain terms: today, if you want a document, you go to the address where it is kept — and whoever controls that address can change it, move it, or take it down. Content addressing is like asking a library for "the book whose exact contents match this fingerprint": any copy, anywhere, will do, and nobody can quietly swap it for a different one.

2. An identity-based, pseudonymous, low-level messaging system. A way for parties to send messages to one another tied to cryptographic identities rather than to real-world names or to a platform's accounts.

3. A consensus engine. Wood described this as "a means of agreeing some rules of interaction" that are then carried out "automatically and irrevocably ... enforced exactly as specified" — the blockchain layer, exemplified by Bitcoin and Ethereum, that lets strangers agree on a shared state of affairs without a referee (Wood, 2014).

4. A browser and user-interface layer — what Wood called a "ÐApp browser," complete with familiar furniture such as a URI bar and a back button — to tie the other three components together into something an ordinary person could actually use.

The structure of this list is itself revealing. Each component is a decentralised substitute for an existing centralised service: content-addressed storage replaces the hosting company, pseudonymous messaging replaces the messaging platform, the consensus engine replaces the trusted record-keeper such as a bank or registry, and the ÐApp browser replaces the conventional browser-plus-cloud arrangement. Web3, in Wood's original conception, was a full-stack replacement for the institutional plumbing of Web 2.0, not a single product.

In plain terms: Wood was not proposing one new gadget. He was sketching an entire alternative set of pipes for the internet — storage, messaging, record-keeping, and the browser to use them — each designed so that no single company sits in the middle as the gatekeeper.

A point easy to miss in this list — and central to this book's argument — is that the consensus-ledger is only one of the four components, not the whole of Web3. The blockchain handles the data Wood classed as "agreed"; but the system's treatment of private information rests on a different set of tools entirely. Wood was explicit that interactions would be carried out "over encrypted channels and only with pseudonymous identities as endpoints" (Wood, 2014). Encrypted messaging and pseudonymous, key-based identity are not blockchain features; they are applications of public-key cryptography that long predate Bitcoin. In Wood's original design they sit co-equal with the ledger, each enforcing a different one of his data-sovereignty assumptions. The implication, developed across this book, is that Web3 was from the very beginning a cryptographic re-architecture of the web — of which the blockchain is the most visible but not the defining part — rather than, as the later shorthand would have it, simply "blockchain technology." The deliberate point of the whole arrangement, Wood wrote, was to "mathematically enforce our prior assumptions, since no government or organisation can reasonably be trusted" (Wood, 2014).

In plain terms: people often equate "Web3" with "blockchain," but in Wood's blueprint the blockchain is one pillar of four. Just as important is the cryptography that keeps messages encrypted and lets people act under pseudonyms rather than real names — older mathematics that has nothing to do with blockchains. Web3, properly understood, is a re-build of the web out of cryptography in general, not the blockchain alone.

Institutionalising the vision: the Web3 Foundation

A coined word and a blog post do not make a movement; an institution and money help. In 2017 Wood founded the Web3 Foundation, a nonprofit established to fund research and development of decentralised-internet infrastructure (Wikipedia: Gavin Wood, n.d.). Its first and flagship project was Polkadot, a network for connecting many blockchains, whose technical white paper Wood had authored in 2016 (Wikipedia: Gavin Wood, n.d.). The foundation states its mission as nurturing "Web 3.0, a decentralized and fair internet where users control their own data, identity and destiny" (Web3 Foundation, n.d.).

Two things are worth noticing. First, the founding of a foundation — with grants, funded teams, and a research agenda — turned "Web3" from a coinage into a banner under which work could be organised and capital deployed; the word now had a balance sheet behind it. Second, the foundation's own language already begins to broaden Wood's original security argument into the wider rhetoric of "controlling your own data, identity and destiny" that would come to dominate later usage. The seed of the term's later mutation is visible at the moment of its institutionalisation.

The crucial disambiguation: two "Web 3.0s"

Here we reach the chapter's load-bearing point, and one of the load-bearing contributions of this book as a whole. Wood titled his essay "What Web 3.0 Looks Like" — but the phrase "Web 3.0" had already been in use for years, meaning something entirely different. That earlier meaning was the Semantic Web, a vision set out by the Web's own inventor.

In May 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, together with the computer scientists James Hendler and Ora Lassila, published an article titled "The Semantic Web" in Scientific American (Berners-Lee, Hendler & Lassila, 2001). They defined their subject carefully: the Semantic Web is "not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee, Hendler & Lassila, 2001). The article's subtitle promised "a new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers."

The Semantic Web is, in essence, a plan to make web pages understandable to machines, not just to humans. Today a web page showing a concert listing is, to a computer, mostly a blob of text and pictures; a person reads it and understands "this band plays at this venue on this date," but the machine does not grasp those meanings. The Semantic Web proposed tagging information with standardised, machine-readable meaning — so that software "agents" could read across the whole web, combine facts, and act on them. The everyday analogy: it is the difference between a shelf of books a human must read one by one, and a library catalogue in which every fact is already sorted into labelled fields a computer can query.

The intellectual lineage here is utterly distinct from Wood's. Berners-Lee's "Web 3.0" was a project about data interoperability and machine intelligence — an ancestor, in spirit, of today's linked-data systems and, arguably, of aspects of modern AI. It had nothing to do with blockchains, decentralised ownership, money, or distrust of institutions. Wood's "Web 3.0," by contrast, was a project about decentralisation and trustlessness — engineering away the need to rely on intermediaries. Two thinkers, both reaching for the label of "the web's next version," meant by it two unrelated things: machine-readable meaning versus institution-free trust.

This collision is the reason the orthography matters. As the blockchain meaning spread, the community increasingly wrote it as "Web3" — one word, no decimal point — precisely to distinguish it from Berners-Lee's "Web 3.0" with its space and its decimal (CoinDesk, 2022; Wikipedia: Web3, n.d.). The typography is not a trivial style choice; it is a small act of intellectual demarcation, an attempt to prevent two distinct lineages from being mistaken for one. Throughout this book we follow that convention: "Web3" denotes the blockchain-based, Wood-derived project, and "Web 3.0" is reserved for the older Semantic-Web meaning where context requires it. Chapter 27, Disentangling the Terms, develops this distinction further, and adds a third frequently-conflated idea, the metaverse.

In plain terms: there are two completely different ideas wearing almost the same name. One, from the inventor of the Web in 2001, wanted to make the web smarter — readable by machines. The other, from 2014, wanted to make the web less dependent on trusted middlemen. They are not two versions of one idea; they are two ideas that happen to share a number. Most public confusion about "what Web3 is" begins right here.

The deeper roots: cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists

Wood coined the word in 2014, but the ideology it carries is older than the Web itself. The distrust of institutions, the faith in cryptography as a tool of liberation, the preference for code over law and for mathematics over promises — these come from a movement that predates Wood by more than two decades: the cypherpunks.

The cypherpunks were a group of programmers, cryptographers, and privacy activists who came together in the early 1990s. The movement was founded in late 1992 by Eric Hughes, Timothy C. May, and John Gilmore, who began meeting monthly at Gilmore's company, Cygnus Solutions, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and who ran an influential electronic mailing list (Wikipedia: Cypherpunk, n.d.). The name itself — coined by the hacker Jude Milhon — fused "cipher" (a method of encryption) with "cyberpunk" (the dystopian science-fiction genre).

In plain terms: the cypherpunks were an activist subculture that believed strong encryption — the same mathematics that scrambles a message so only its intended reader can unscramble it — could shift power away from governments and corporations and toward individuals. They were, in effect, the ideological grandparents of Web3.

Two short texts from this milieu are the founding documents of the worldview Web3 would inherit. The first is Timothy C. May's "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," written in 1988 and distributed in 1992. Its opening parodies Marx — "A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy" — and its central claim is that cryptography would let people "communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner," conducting business and negotiating contracts "without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other" (May, 1988/1992). May, a former senior scientist at Intel with a pronounced libertarian streak, explicitly framed cryptography as a force that would "alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions" (May, 1988/1992). This is the explicitly anti-state strand of the lineage.

The second, and more constructive in tone, is Eric Hughes's "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto," published on 9 March 1993. It opens with a sentence that could serve as an epigraph for the whole tradition: "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age" (Hughes, 1993). Hughes drew a careful distinction that still matters in debates about Web3 identity (the subject of Chapter 22): "A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world" (Hughes, 1993). And crucially, Hughes turned the manifesto into a call for building rather than merely arguing, coining the movement's enduring slogan: "Cypherpunks write code." As he put it, "We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy ... and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it" (Hughes, 1993).

In plain terms: these two short essays, written before the Web was a household word, already contain the DNA of Web3 — distrust of state and corporate power, a belief that privacy and freedom must be built in software rather than requested from authorities, and the conviction that "writing code" is itself a political act. When Web3 advocates today say "don't trust, verify" or "code is law," they are speaking in a dialect the cypherpunks invented.

The technical bridge from this ideology to Web3 is Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 white paper, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, was circulated to a cryptography mailing list directly descended from the cypherpunk tradition, and it proposed exactly the kind of system the cypherpunks had dreamed of: electronic payments "based on cryptographic proof instead of trust," removing the "trusted third party" from the handling of money (Nakamoto, 2008). Bitcoin, examined in Chapter 12, supplied the working "consensus engine" that Wood's Web3 architecture would later treat as one of its four pillars. The line of descent is therefore continuous: cypherpunk ideology (1988–1993) → Bitcoin's working implementation (2008) → Wood's generalisation of the idea into a whole "web" (2014).

In plain terms: Web3 did not appear from nowhere in 2014. It is the latest layer of a thirty-year project: 1990s activists argued that cryptography could free individuals from institutions; Bitcoin in 2008 proved the idea could work for money; and Wood in 2014 proposed extending the same logic to the entire web.

How the term spread — and mutated

A coined term is not a fixed thing; it is a living object that changes as more people use it. Between 2014 and the early 2020s, "Web3" travelled a long way from Wood's careful four-component definition — gaining enormous reach and, many would argue, losing precision along the way.

Through the 2017 cryptocurrency boom — driven largely by the wave of token sales known as initial coin offerings (ICOs), in which projects raised money by issuing new tokens — the word circulated mainly within crypto-developer circles, still attached to the infrastructural vision of decentralised protocols. It was the second boom, in 2021, that pushed "Web3" into mainstream consciousness, and in doing so reshaped its meaning.

The most consequential agent of this shift was the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and, in particular, its general partner Chris Dixon, who heads the firm's crypto-investment arm. Dixon and a16z energetically promoted "Web3" as the name for the next era of the internet — and, not incidentally, as the category in which the firm had invested heavily. Dixon's framing crystallised in his 2024 book Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet, which organises the entire history of the internet around a memorable three-word slogan: a "read" era, a "read-write" era, and a "read-write-own" era, "sometimes called web3, in which blockchain networks are granting power and economic benefits to communities of users, not just corporations" (Dixon, 2024).

The "read, write, own" triad — earlier echoed by Ethereum.org's formula that "Web1 was read-only, Web2 is read-write, Web3 will be read-write-own" (Ethereum.org, n.d.) — is the framing through which most non-specialists now encounter the term. We examine it critically in Chapter 25, Toward a Definition. Note for now how far it has drifted from Wood: the emphasis has migrated from trustlessness (a security-and-politics idea) to ownership (an economic idea).

This drift is the crux of the term's mutation. Wood's 2014 Web3 was primarily about not having to trust institutions. The popularised 2021 Web3 was primarily about owning a share of the internet — owning tokens, owning digital assets, owning a slice of the networks one uses. The two are related: trustless infrastructure is part of what makes digital ownership enforceable. But the centre of gravity moved. In the popularised version, "Web3" came to gesture loosely at the whole crypto economy — tokens, NFTs, decentralised finance, the metaverse — much of which had little to do with Wood's original four components, and some of which Wood himself would not recognise as part of his vision.

This broadening drew sharp criticism, and the criticism is itself part of the term's history. Skeptics argued that "Web3" had become less a technical category than a marketing repackaging of cryptocurrency speculation. The software engineer Stephen Diehl, in a much-circulated December 2021 essay, called Web3 "a vapid marketing campaign" designed to reframe negative public associations with crypto into "a false narrative about disruption of legacy tech company hegemony" (Diehl, 2021). The Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike, after building applications on the stack himself, observed in January 2022 that despite the decentralisation rhetoric, the ecosystem was in practice re-centralising around a handful of companies — because "people do not want to run their own servers" — so that "the space is consolidating around ... platforms. Again" (Marlinspike, 2022). And the engineer and researcher Molly White launched the satirical tracker Web3 is Going Just Great in December 2021 to catalogue the sector's hacks, scams, and collapses, treating the term largely as hype (White, n.d.). We engage these critiques in full in Chapter 29; here they matter as evidence that, by 2021–2022, "Web3" had become a contested word, claimed by promoters and disputed by skeptics, with no neutral ground in between.

In plain terms: the word started narrow and technical, owned by a small group of builders, then went mainstream during a financial boom — and as it spread it both gained meanings (digital ownership, the whole crypto economy) and lost precision. By the time most people first heard "Web3," it had become as much a marketing banner and an investment thesis as a technical proposal — which is exactly why so many smart observers cannot agree on what it means.

Why the contested history is part of the answer

It would be convenient to treat the messy history of the word as mere background — a preamble to be cleared away before defining Web3 "properly." This book takes the opposite view: the contestation is the phenomenon. There is no neutral, authoritative definition of Web3 waiting to be uncovered, because the term has been, from almost its first day, the site of a struggle over meaning among at least four constituencies, each with a stake in what it denotes.

There is Wood's original meaning — a zero-trust, four-component re-architecture of the web's plumbing. There is the cypherpunk inheritance — the older ideology of cryptographic liberation that gives the project its moral and political charge. There is the venture-capital framing of Dixon and a16z — "read, write, own," in which Web3 is the next great investment frontier and the story is one of user ownership. And there is the skeptics' counter-definition — Web3 as a marketing repackaging of speculation, decentralised in rhetoric and re-centralised in fact. Layered atop all of this is the persistent confusion with Berners-Lee's Semantic Web, which means that even the bare phrase "Web 3.0" cannot be used without first asking which lineage the speaker has in mind.

To ask "what is Web3?" is therefore, in part, to ask "whose Web3?" The word is what scholars of language call an essentially contested concept: its meaning is bound up with disagreements about value and purpose that cannot be settled by definition alone, because the parties want the word to do different work. This is not a flaw in our inquiry to be apologised for; it is the central finding of this chapter, and it shapes the strategy of the entire book. We do not attempt to legislate a single correct meaning. Instead, we hold the competing meanings in view, trace each to its source, and assess the claims each makes — which is why the definition this book ultimately defends (Chapter 25) treats Web3 not as a single technology but as a contested socio-technical project: a bundle of blockchain technologies fused with an ideology of decentralisation and ownership.

In plain terms: the reason "what is Web3?" has no one-line answer is not that the topic is too technical for outsiders. It is that several groups — its inventor, its ideological ancestors, its investors, and its critics — mean genuinely different things by the word, and all of them are using it at once. Understanding that disagreement is not a step before understanding Web3; it is a large part of understanding Web3.

Synthesis

This chapter has traced "Web3" from a single dated blog post outward, in both directions in time. Backward, the word's roots run through Bitcoin (2008) to the cypherpunk and crypto-anarchist manifestos of the early 1990s (Hughes, 1993; May, 1988/1992), which supplied the ideology of cryptographic trustlessness that Gavin Wood would generalise into a vision of the whole web in 2014. Forward, the term spread through two crypto cycles and was reframed — especially by a16z and Chris Dixon — from Wood's trustlessness toward a popular emphasis on ownership, gaining mainstream reach while shedding precision and attracting vigorous criticism. Cutting across the whole story is a persistent ambiguity: Wood's "Web 3.0" shares a name, but nothing else, with Tim Berners-Lee's earlier Semantic Web (Berners-Lee, Hendler & Lassila, 2001) — two distinct intellectual lineages braided together by an accident of numbering.

The chapter's contribution to the book's central question is therefore both substantive and methodological. Substantively, it identifies the ideological core that the later technical chapters will flesh out: the demand, inherited from the cypherpunks and crystallised by Wood, that we re-engineer the web to trust institutions less and verify more. Methodologically, it establishes that "Web3" is an essentially contested term whose competing meanings must be held in view rather than collapsed into one. With this intellectual history in hand, the book now turns from the word to the machinery: Part III, beginning with Chapter 8, Cryptography for Non-Specialists, examines the technical foundations — hashing, keys, signatures, distributed systems, and the blockchain — that any of these visions of Web3 would have to be built upon.

References cited in this chapter

Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., & Lassila, O. (2001, May). The Semantic Web. Scientific American, 284(5), 34–43. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-semantic-web/

Wood, G. (2022, April 20). What is 'Web3'? Gavin Wood, who coined the term in 2014, explains his vision [Interview by R. Browne]. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/20/what-is-web3-gavin-wood-who-invented-the-word-gives-his-vision.html

CoinDesk. (2022, January 4). What is Web 3? Here's how future Polkadot founder Gavin Wood explained it in 2014 [reprint of Wood, 2014]. https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2022/01/04/what-is-web-3-heres-how-future-polkadot-founder-gavin-wood-explained-it-in-2014

Diehl, S. (2021, December 4). Web3 is Bullshit [blog post]. Stephen Diehl. https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html

Dixon, C. (2024). Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet. Random House. https://readwriteown.com/

Ethereum.org. (n.d.). What is Web3 and why is it important? Retrieved June 2026, from https://ethereum.org/web3/

Hughes, E. (1993, March 9). A Cypherpunk's Manifesto. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

Marlinspike, M. (2022, January 7). My first impressions of web3 [blog post]. Moxie.org. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

May, T. C. (1988/1992). The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto. Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/crypto-anarchist-manifesto/

Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Web3 Foundation. (n.d.). About. Retrieved June 2026, from https://web3.foundation/about/

White, M. (n.d.). Web3 is Going Just Great. Retrieved June 2026, from https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Cypherpunk. Wikipedia. Retrieved June 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk

Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Gavin Wood. Wikipedia. Retrieved June 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Wood

Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Web3. Wikipedia. Retrieved June 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3

Wood, G. (2014, April 17). ÐApps: What Web 3.0 Looks Like [blog post]. Insights into a Modern World. https://gavwood.com/dappsweb3.html

Wood, G. (2018, September 12). Why We Need Web 3.0 [blog post]. Medium. https://gavofyork.medium.com/why-we-need-web-3-0-5da4f2bf95ab