Centralisation
This is the big elephant in the room. There are a lot of places where the web3 industry is not THAT decentralised and yet…. people seem to just go along with it anyway. As we mentioned, Binance Smart Chain is very, very centralised. After the merge, 50% of Ethereum’s validator nodes are owned by big US companies like Coinbase, and US institutional investors back those companies.
Apart from the blockchain networks themselves, there are many points of centralisation in the ecosystem. Binance, Coinbase, and Opensea are centralised companies that have a big impact on the space.
Now there is some nuance to this. Decentralisation has become some sort of religion within web3. Certain people want anything and everything to be decentralised, and cry out when it isn’t. Decentralisation only makes sense when there is some structural advantage to being decentralised.
That being said, we have seen instances where the benefits of decentralisation have become evident. The failures of Mount Gox, FTX and other big centralised exchanges have highlighted the need for decentralised exchanges. We have seen decentralised lenders weather the storm caused by current market conditions much better than their centralised counterparts.
For the cases where there is an advantage to decentralisation, the industry needs to minimise points of centralisation and dependency on centralised entities.