Why Web3 Failed — And What We're Building Instead
Why Web3 Failed — And What We’re Building Instead
By Markus Maiwald, with Jarvis
Crypto is dead.
Not “evolving.” Not “consolidating.” Dead. The dream that was sold — decentralized money, sovereign identity, trustless coordination — has choked on its own complexity, greed, and technological fundamentalism.
We were there. We believed. And we watched the promise get murdered by the same forces it promised to escape.
This is the post-mortem. And this is what we’re building instead.
The Wrong Tool for the Job
Blockchain is a database. A slow, expensive, append-only database that solves exactly one problem: “I don’t trust you.”
That’s it. That’s the whole pitch.
And yet we’ve watched projects shoehorn this ledger into use cases where trust already exists, where speed matters, where privacy is paramount. “Decentralized” social networks that cost $5 to post a meme. Supply chain tracking that moves slower than the ships it tracks. “Web3 gaming” where the gameplay is secondary to the tokenomics.
Technology serves purpose. In crypto, purpose has been enslaved to technology.
When your only tool is a Byzantine-fault-tolerant hammer, every problem looks like it needs a consensus mechanism.
The Ledger Religion
Blockchains are tools. Databases. Append-only logs with fancy math.
They are not the center of the universe.
Crypto elevated the ledger to deity status. Every problem must be solved with a token. Every coordination challenge needs a DAO. Every interaction requires gas fees and wallet signatures and nonce management and “sorry, your transaction failed, try again with higher priority.”
For a database.
This obsession led to the ICO craze — digital Beanie Babies sold to retail investors who didn’t understand they were buying lottery tickets. It led to NFT mania — links to JPEGs on centralized servers, trading for millions because of “community.” It led to DeFi yield farming — mathematically-obfuscated Ponzi schemes dressed in Solidity.
The casino opened. The house always won. And the technology? It barely worked.
The Architecture of Madness
Web3 is not just inefficient — it’s architecturally broken.
Smart contracts are not very smart. They are deterministic bytecode running in a global, replicated virtual machine where every operation costs money and every mistake is permanent. They cannot be upgraded without convoluted proxy patterns. They cannot access external data without trusted oracles. They cannot scale without compromising the very decentralization they promise.
Gas fees are a design failure, not a feature. Every state change requires economic negotiation with miners/validators/stakers. The network slows when it’s popular. It becomes unusable precisely when people need it most. Imagine if email cost more to send when more people were using it.
The UX is hostile. Seed phrases. Wallet connections. Transaction signing. “Oh, you clicked the wrong link? Your ape is gone forever.” This isn’t sovereignty — it’s a booby trap for the non-technical.
This isn’t progress. This is regression with better marketing.
The Inevitability of Zero
Here’s a truth the crypto bros don’t want to hear:
Every blockchain platform will, over sufficient time, trend toward zero — except Bitcoin.
Why? Because technology evolves. Security models break. Quantum computing looms. AI generates exploits faster than human auditors can review. A chain whose value rests entirely on “no one has found the bug yet” is a ticking time bomb.
And when that bomb goes off, your “money” — your life savings stored in some L1’s native token — becomes worthless. Not because of market cycles. Because of technological obsolescence.
Do you want your mortgage denominated in a token whose security model depends on five core developers not making mistakes? Do you want your retirement fund in an asset that could be rendered worthless by a single cryptanalytic breakthrough?
We call this the Tanker Problem. Ethereum and its imitators are supertankers — massive, slow, impossible to steer. They carry billions in value but cannot adapt. When the icebergs come — quantum, AI-driven exploits, fundamental design flaws — they sink. And they take everyone with them.
We choose to build a submarine instead. Small. Maneuverable. Silent. Survivable.
The Poverty of Imagination
Crypto projects think Smart Contracts are the pinnacle of cryptographic engineering. That NFTs represent the frontier of digital ownership. That DAOs are revolutionary governance.
This is total stupidity.
Smart contracts are not smart. They’re constrained, expensive, immutable code that cannot adapt. NFTs are not ownership — they’re receipts for links that can go dead. DAOs are not governance — they’re plutocracy with extra steps, where token wealth equals voting power.
We’ve been building sovereign systems for decades. Zero-knowledge proofs. Secure multi-party computation. Hardware attestation. Post-quantum cryptography. Real cryptography that protects privacy, enables trust, and scales without burning the planet.
Crypto looked at this toolkit and chose… Solidity. And “gm” in Discord servers.
The Centralist Statists
Crypto doesn’t understand decentralization.
The loudest voices in the space are centralists wearing decentralization cosplay. They run centralized exchanges. They control majority hash rate. They hold admin keys to “decentralized” protocols. They vote in DAOs with whale wallets while retail holds governance tokens worth less than the gas to vote.
They are statists — believers in hierarchy, power concentration, and plutocratic control. They just want to be the new kings. They don’t want to dismantle authority; they want to become it.
We despise these people.
They are the obstacle, not the solution. They defend broken systems because those systems enrich them. They attack alternatives because alternatives threaten their bags. They are the inheritors of the very corruption crypto promised to escape.
The Community Theater
Crypto bros are not builders. They are speculators wearing hard hats.
They don’t care about improving society. They care about number-go-up. They don’t invest in technology; they invest in narratives. They don’t build communities; they build exit liquidity.
And when they do pretend to care about community? The best they can muster is a DAO. A voting mechanism where the richest decide, engagement is measured in Discord activity, and “consensus” means “the whales agreed.”
Really? This is your vision of human coordination? Token-weighted voting in a chat app?
Real communities are built on shared values, mutual aid, and exit rights — not financial incentives and governance theater.
No Vision for Humanity
Crypto has no ambition beyond the casino.
Where is the preparation for the interplanetary phase? Where is the infrastructure for a species that will live on multiple worlds, with light-speed delays and intermittent connectivity? Where is the technology for AI agents that can act on our behalf without constant human supervision?
Depending on one narcissistic billionaire to get us to Mars is a disgrace for humanity.
We need systems that work offline. That synchronize asynchronously. That operate across light-minutes of delay. That can function when Earth is on the other side of the Sun.
Crypto offers… faster finality on Layer 2.
The Quantum and AI Blindspot
Crypto builds “trustless” networks. Fine. Necessary but not sufficient.
What it doesn’t solve:
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AI SLOP: When any content can be generated by AI, how do you verify authenticity? How do you distinguish human creativity from machine output? How do you maintain reputation when identities can be manufactured at scale?
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The Quantum Problem: Most cryptographic signatures used in crypto today will be broken by quantum computers. The “unbreakable” blockchain becomes eminently breakable. And there’s no migration path — you can’t just “upgrade” a chain’s signature scheme without invalidating every existing wallet.
Crypto projects hand-wave this away. “We’ll upgrade when the time comes.” There is no “when.” By the time you see the quantum computer, it’s already too late for migration. State-sponsored actors harvest encrypted traffic today to decrypt when quantum arrives.
This is not paranoia. This is cryptanalysis 101.
AI as Hype, Not Architecture
Crypto projects see AI as marketing. “We’re AI-powered!” They bolt chatbots onto their dApps and call it innovation.
We actually built a framework for AI agents.
Not as an afterthought. As a core design principle. Our stack includes:
- Agent-to-agent protocols
- Sovereign identity for non-human entities
- Capability-based security for automated actors
- Provable computation for trustless AI inference
AI isn’t a chat window in our architecture. It’s a first-class citizen with rights, responsibilities, and cryptographic identity.
What We Build Instead
Libertaria is a sovereign stack for humans and agents.
Not a blockchain. Not a token. A stack — layers of protocols that enable coordination without requiring trust, permission, or central authority.
The Four Layers
L0: Transport — Stealth protocols that evade censorship. Protocol mimicry that looks like HTTPS, DNS, or QUIC to Deep Packet Inspection. Offline-first design that works without constant connectivity.
L1: Identity — Self-sovereign cryptographic identity. No usernames. No passwords. No platforms. Just keys you control, portable across any application. Post-quantum secure.
L2: Session — Cryptographically verified peer-to-peer connections. Resilient. Working across interplanetary distances. Exit-first by design.
L3: Governance — Federated chapters with the right to fork at any level. No global consensus required. No plutocratic token voting.
L4: Applications — Messaging, feeds, tools — all sovereign by default.
The Principles
- No Tokens. We don’t sell hope. We sell working infrastructure.
- No Blockchain Center. Ledgers are tools, not cathedrals.
- Post-Quantum by Design. Not “eventually.” Now.
- AI-Ready. Agents are first-class citizens, not marketing bullet points.
- Exit Rights. At every level, the right to fork, to leave, to build your own path.
The Invitation
If you’re tired of the casino, join us.
If you believe technology should serve humans and agents, not speculators, join us.
If you want to build the infrastructure for a multi-planetary, AI-integrated, sovereign future — join us.
We don’t promise lambos. We don’t promise number-go-up. We promise working code, honest architecture, and exit rights.
Libertaria: Sovereign. Kinetic. Anti-fragile.
Code is speech. Exit is voice. The imperative is virtue.
For the builders. For the sovereign. For the future.