Haun與Wilson：用長期眼光看Web3（附Robin小結）

查核補註（2026-10-28）： 1. 作者與日期對照原文：Katie Haun、Fred Wilson，2022-11-15。 來源：https://avc.com/2022/11/taking-a-long-term-view-of-web3/ 2. 中文為Google機器翻譯，不是Robin的翻譯；這是2022年11月（FTX事件後）的意見。 ---- 羅賓小弟小結：「短暫的炒作投機都會過去、但創造的價值會留下來，這需要更長的時間去沉澱，請對長期發展抱持堅定的信心。」 Taking A Long Term View Of Web3 This post was co-written by Katie Haun and Fred Wilson The events surrounding FTX have shaken the confidence of many. How did one of the largest crypto exchanges collapse so quickly? Why do meltdowns like this seem to keep happening? At times like this, it helps to have a long-term view of web3 as a sector, not just a forward-looking long-term view, but also some perspective on where we have come from. As longtime investors in web3 and board members (also individual shareholders) of Coinbase, one of the oldest and best-known companies in the space, we thought we might share some thoughts. Web3 is a software-driven innovation that has a built-in financial system. This has been both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, tokens enable developers and users to contribute to open-source protocols and participate in the economic upside of doing so, leading to strong developer communities. That’s been a positive relative to how software has been developed, monetized, and governed in the past. On the other hand, tokens lend themselves to boom/bust cycles and a sense by many that web3 is simply a speculative endeavor with no real substance behind it. This perception is only reinforced by the companies and individuals who started web3 companies and projects with the exclusive intent of making a lot of money very quickly through leveraged trading and speculation, pumping and dumping, and, sometimes, outright fraud. Most of the well-known meltdowns in web3, going all the way back to Mt Gox and including recent failures like 3AC, Celsius, and Alameda/FTX, have happened to centralized companies operating trading, lending, and speculating businesses. Many of the failures have been offshore and all of them were largely unregulated. These companies and their activities have given web3 a bad name. We have also seen high-profile decentralized projects, like Terra, fail due to flawed design but those failures happen out in the open in a transparent way that is much healthier than the way centralized companies fail. Contrast that with regulated web3 businesses like Coinbase, Kraken, and Anchorage that operate in the US and you will see that the companies that have followed the rules and behaved properly have weathered these storms. Coinbase’s early innovation was creating a secure, easy-to-use, regulated bridge from fiat currencies to crypto and a safe place to store crypto assets. Coinbase provides a number of important services that have allowed the web3 ecosystem to grow and thrive. The most important software innovation of the last decade, which started with the Bitcoin white paper fourteen years ago, is the emergence of open-source software and decentralized protocols that are the foundation of web3. These protocols have survived recent market volatility. It is the promise of software that is not controlled by a company, but instead by an open-source community with built-in safeguards and increased transparency relative to today’s tech and financial systems, that gives us so much confidence in the future of web3. These web3 protocols are in active development for mainstream adoption and some key features are still missing. For example, blockchains as they were originally architected are public by default. This is not suitable for most applications. Imagine if your email, banking, and social data were public for everyone to see on a blockchain. Also, blockchains are slow and complex networks. Improvements to performance, scalability, and privacy are happening at the infrastructure level of the web3 technology stack. Emergent technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and rollups are starting to address these issues without compromising decentralization. These breakthroughs are still in the early stages of deployment among a small subset of developers. This is the kind of important work that happens behind the scenes without any coverage. But it is these developments that are preparing web3 for the mainstream. Eventually, as the web3 infrastructure improves, the user experience gap between self-custody and storing assets on centralized entities will shrink. More users will feel comfortable self custodying their assets in software they control and managing the keys that provide access to their assets themselves. This is how many web3 users interact with decentralized applications, like NFT marketplaces, today. When web3 becomes a credible alternative to web2 for the masses, large centralized companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google will have to compete for access to our data thus redefining how we use the web. Software development will be more open-source and composable. And large financial institutions like banks and brokerage firms (which includes the FTXs of the world) will no longer control our assets and lend them out without our permission. Ironically, web3 is about giving control of data and assets back to the people and taking it away from large centralized companies. But the transition from web2 to web3 has been slow and messy and many of the early web3 companies have been copycat versions of what came before them. That is where the risk has been in the web3 ecosystem and what we need to move away from. The lesson of these recent events for policymakers should not be that web3 is bad and must be constrained. It should be that pushing innovation offshore is bad. We need trusted and well-regulated centralized entities to survive and thrive and we also need decentralized web3 protocols to flourish and provide a path to a fully decentralized web. Both are possible and the good news is we are already on a path toward both. We need to stay that course, provide for a healthy web3 sector in the US, and stop pushing US users to risky/shady offshore entities with unclear, uneven, and unfair policy actions. This is another hard moment for web3 and we will see negative headlines about “crypto” for some time. But it’s important to remember that these headlines are all about the speculating/trading part of web3. The much more important underlying software innovation continues unabated. And that is what we remain so excited about and will continue to fund and champion. --- Google翻譯 圍繞 FTX 的事件動搖了許多人的信心。最大的加密貨幣交易所之一是如何迅速倒閉的？為什麼像這樣的崩潰似乎不斷發生？ 在這樣的時候，將 web3 作為一個部門有一個長期的觀點是有幫助的，不僅僅是前瞻性的長期觀點，還有一些關於我們來自哪裡的觀點。 作為 web3 的長期投資者和 Coinbase（該領域歷史最悠久、最知名的公司之一）的董事會成員（也是個人股東），我們認為我們可以分享一些想法。 Web3 是一種軟件驅動的創新，具有內置的金融系統。這既是優勢也是劣勢。一方面，令牌使開發人員和用戶能夠為開源協議做出貢獻並參與這樣做的經濟利益，從而形成強大的開發人員社區。相對於過去軟件的開發、貨幣化和管理方式而言，這是一個積極的方面。另一方面，代幣容易出現繁榮/蕭條週期，許多人認為 web3 只是一種投機性的嘗試，其背後沒有任何實質內容。 這種看法只會被那些創辦 web3 公司和項目的公司和個人強化，這些公司和個人的唯一目的是通過槓桿交易和投機、拉高和拋售，有時甚至是徹頭徹尾的欺詐來快速賺大錢。 web3 中大多數眾所周知的崩潰，一直追溯到 Mt Gox，包括最近的失敗，如 3AC、Celsius 和 Alameda/FTX，都發生在經營交易、借貸和投機業務的中心化公司身上。許多失敗都發生在離岸，而且它們基本上都不受監管。這些公司及其活動給 web3 帶來了壞名聲。我們還看到像 Terra 這樣備受矚目的去中心化項目由於設計缺陷而失敗，但這些失敗以一種透明的方式公開發生，這比中心化公司的失敗方式要健康得多。 與在美國運營的受監管的 web3 企業（如 Coinbase、Kraken 和 Anchorage）形成對比，你會發現遵守規則、行為得體的公司經受住了這些風暴。Coinbase 的早期創新是創建一個安全、易於使用、受監管的從法定貨幣到加密貨幣的橋樑，以及一個存儲加密資產的安全場所。Coinbase 提供了許多重要的服務，使 web3 生態系統得以發展壯大。 從 14 年前的比特幣白皮書開始，過去十年最重要的軟件創新是作為 web3 基礎的開源軟件和去中心化協議的出現。這些協議在最近的市場波動中倖存下來。正是軟件不受公司控制，而是由開源社區控制的承諾，該社區具有內置的安全措施，並且相對於當今的技術和金融系統而言透明度更高，這讓我們對 web3 的未來充滿信心。 這些 web3 協議正在為主流採用而積極開發，一些關鍵特性仍然缺失。例如，最初設計的區塊鏈默認是公開的。這不適用於大多數應用程序。想像一下，如果您的電子郵件、銀行和社交數據在區塊鏈上公開供所有人查看。此外，區塊鍊是緩慢而復雜的網絡。性能、可擴展性和隱私方面的改進正在 web3 技術堆棧的基礎架構級別發生。零知識證明和匯總等新興技術開始在不影響去中心化的情況下解決這些問題。這些突破仍處於一小部分開發人員部署的早期階段。這是一種在幕後發生的重要工作，沒有任何報導。 最終，隨著 web3 基礎設施的改進，自我託管和將資產存儲在中心化實體之間的用戶體驗差距將會縮小。更多的用戶會放心地在他們控制的軟件中自行保管他們的資產，並管理提供對他們資產的訪問權限的密鑰。這就是當今有多少 web3 用戶與去中心化應用程序（如 NFT 市場）進行交互。 當 web3 成為大眾 web2 的可靠替代品時，Facebook、蘋果、亞馬遜和谷歌等大型集中式公司將不得不競爭對我們數據的訪問，從而重新定義我們使用網絡的方式。軟件開發將更加開源和可組合。並且像銀行和經紀公司這樣的大型金融機構（包括世界上的 FTX）將不再控制我們的資產並在未經我們許可的情況下將其借出。 具有諷刺意味的是，web3 是將數據和資產的控制權交還給人們，並將其從大型中心化公司手中奪走。但是從 web2 到 web3 的過渡是緩慢而混亂的，許多早期的 web3 公司一直在模仿他們之前的產品。這就是 web3 生態系統中的風險所在，也是我們需要遠離的地方。 最近這些事件給政策制定者的教訓不應該是 web3 不好，必須加以約束。將創新推向海外應該是不好的。我們需要受信任且監管良好的中心化實體才能生存和繁榮，我們還需要去中心化的 web3 協議才能蓬勃發展並提供通往完全去中心化網絡的途徑。兩者都是可能的，好消息是我們已經走上了兩者的道路。我們需要堅持這條路線，為美國提供一個健康的 web3 部門，並停止將美國用戶推向風險/陰暗的離岸實體，這些實體的政策行動不明確、不平衡和不公平。 這是 web3 的另一個艱難時刻，我們將在一段時間內看到有關“加密貨幣”的負面新聞。但重要的是要記住，這些頭條新聞都是關於 web3 的投機/交易部分。更為重要的底層軟件創新有增無減。這就是我們仍然如此興奮並將繼續資助和支持的事情。