The ideals that Web3 put forward were, in many ways, beautiful.
A future where individuals—not platforms—controlled their data and assets.
A world connected without borders, without gatekeepers.
Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, DAOs—all emerged under the banner of “decentralization,” carrying with them the promise of a new social architecture.
Yet ten years have passed.
Looking back, the movement resembles a kind of guerrilla warfare—pressing against the edges of the existing internet, searching for cracks in the dominant platforms, attempting to implement ideals through tactical advances rather than structural reform.
Guerrilla strategies can spread an idea, but they rarely rewrite society’s rules.
Why did technology alone fail to change the world?
One reason is that decentralization and fragmentation were often conflated.
The “decentralization” Web3 called for was meant to be a structural design: a system that prevents trust and power from concentrating at a single point.
But in practice, communities and factions splintered, independent economic zones emerged, and incompatible rules proliferated.
Instead of decentralization, what emerged was fragmentation—parallel micro-worlds with little connective tissue.
Fragmentation weakens information sharing and destroys interoperability.
And eventually, it invites the rise of new central authorities.
Indeed, even within Web3, entities that claimed to be “decentralized” created exchanges and platforms that wielded overwhelming influence.
What was meant to decentralize inadvertently produced another form of centralization.
So what should we take from this decade?
The key lesson is that decentralization must be understood not as a structure but as a method of operating trust.
“How should trust be implemented in society?”
This is the most valuable question Web3 posed.
More important than blockchain itself is how to reduce the cost of verifying truth—and how individuals and society can mutually confirm authenticity in the digital world.
This question stretches far beyond Web3; it touches the future of the internet, AI, IoT, and next-generation infrastructure.
Consider the ideas that remain relevant today:
privacy with transparency,
data self-sovereignty,
interoperability and standards,
and the redefinition of authentication through decentralized identity.
These are not failures—they are intellectual assets left behind by Web3’s struggles.
Another critical lesson is that decentralization cannot exist without distributed power and compute.
No matter how ideal an algorithm is, if the electricity and computational capacity required to operate it are concentrated, the architecture will inevitably drift back toward centralization.
This is why countries like Japan—where local regions possess energy resources and land—have the potential to become experimental grounds for truly decentralized infrastructure.
Here、the theme of local cities holding computational power naturally connects.
The ten years of Web3 demonstrated that technology alone cannot move the world.
But they also forced society to confront a deeper question:
How should trust be handled in the digital age?
Decentralization is not about breaking the world apart; it is about finding a form of trust that keeps the world connected without centralizing authority.
Over the next decade, what answers will we craft?
The shift must be away from fragmentation and toward decentralization for the sake of connection.
That implementation will sit at the core of infrastructure design in the AI era.