Recently, the biggest news in the crypto space is undoubtedly the passage of the US (GENIUS Stablecoin Act).
I once said that the dollar is like China’s college entrance examination—it's not the best system, but it's the least bad one. Against the backdrop of the increasingly fragmented global monetary trust system, the implementation of the GENIUS Act can only be described in four words: mixed blessings.
Fortunately, from now on, the entry point for on-chain dollar assets will be completely opened. Bitcoin has reached $107,000, Ethereum has touched $2,600, and the market's buoyancy seems to indicate everything. More importantly, this is just the beginning.
The worry is that the principle of decentralization will again face 'institutional pressure.' The GENIUS Act explicitly confines the issuance of stablecoins into 'license cages.' Whether algorithmic stablecoins or over-collateralized stablecoins will have to confront regulatory impacts.
However, we have to admire the ingenuity of the American methods: The dollar is indeed declining, but it has also found a way to survive. After the petrodollar, crypto dollars have become the 'last lifeline' of dollar hegemony.
In the global trend of de-dollarization, the dollar has regained its stage through on-chain stablecoins. Liquidity is once again dominated by the dollar, but this time it is presented in the form of on-chain addresses.
Fortunately, it is the dollar. Not the ruble.
But the question arises: When centralized dollar stablecoins enter the crypto world that originally promised 'decentralization,' is it a blessing or a curse?
It may bring compliant traffic or replace those truly decentralized experiments; it may promote global trading freedom or again put control of value back in the hands of 'licensed individuals.'
This is exactly what we must discuss today.
Today is the third article in the 'Decentralization Trilogy' and also the concluding piece. Before we begin, let’s briefly review the main lines of the first two articles:
In the first article, we talked about the shattering of illusions.
In the early hours of April 15, 2025, a fiber optic cable of AWS in Tokyo unexpectedly broke, causing global crypto trading volume to plummet by 15% within an hour, and mainstream exchanges collectively collapsed; eight days later, small and medium-sized crypto platforms in Europe faced new Google ad regulations, leading to a 67% drop in traffic exposure within just three days.
These two real impacts have stripped away the mask of 'pseudo-decentralization.' On-chain decentralization still relies on Web2. Code may be distributed, but traffic is still in the hands of giants.
In the second article, we attempted to redefine 'true decentralization.'
True decentralization is not about everything turning into on-chain code but achieving three important characteristics:
Data distributed ledger, immutable;
Incentive mechanisms are embedded, and the network self-maintains through market forces;
Governance rules are executed automatically, transparently, and publicly, without arbitrary decisions.
We even measured the decentralization degree of three mainstream chains using the HHI index—unexpectedly finding that Ethereum's degree of decentralization far exceeds that of Bitcoin and Solana.
Today, we will take a closer look at life.
We only ask one thing—
What do these abstract 'decentralizations' have to do with you?
The answer is: Relationships have grown.
It concerns your wallet, your sources of income, and even your future entrepreneurial opportunities. It is not some idealistic slogan but an economic reality that is occurring and evolving.
This article will depict how decentralization translates from concept to a new economic order through three core pathways:
Everything Tokenized: Allowing value to flow freely like information;
Airdrop Economy: Evolving from user payments to platforms sharing money back;
Open-source Innovation Flywheel: Using puzzle-like modules to build global applications.
These three are not isolated; they form a closed-loop system, a new economic paradigm of exponential innovation.
Next, we will elaborate one by one.
1. Everything Tokenized: The internet upgrades from an information network to a value network.
Recall when email first emerged; people were astonished to find that text, images, and audio could be instantly sent to the other side of the earth. But for decades, we have yet to solve another problem: Can 'value'—like real estate, currency, gold, and future earnings—flow as freely and efficiently as information?
Today, this question finally has a clear answer—Tokenization.
1.1 What is Tokenization?
In short, tokenization is the transformation of valuable assets in the real world (such as houses, cars, gold, dollars) into digital certificates (tokens) on the blockchain. These certificates can be transmitted globally in real-time, just like emails.
For example: You have 1 million dollars. In the past, cross-border remittances required a lengthy bank process, taking days or even weeks. Now, through the stablecoin USDC issued by Circle, you can tokenize this amount into 1 million USDC and send it to any blockchain address globally with almost zero delay.
If the other party needs to convert to fiat currency, they can simply go through compliant financial channels. This enables seamless integration between on-chain and off-chain assets, allowing value to flow as freely as text.
1.2 How is Tokenization Achieved?
The entire process can be summarized in three steps:
Step 1: Asset custody and confirmation of rights. Take gold as an example; physical gold must be entrusted to a compliant custodian. If it is a chain-native asset (like ETH), it should be locked in a smart contract.
Step 2: Issue token certificates. After custody is completed, the system generates tokens according to preset rules (such as a 1:1 peg). For example, Paxos' PAXG is a gold token issued based on physical gold.
Step 3: On-chain circulation and redemption. Once tokens are issued, they can be used for transfers, transactions, and DeFi applications globally. Holders can also redeem the corresponding assets according to the protocol.
This process significantly simplifies the traditional asset transfer logic, making it as efficient as email.
1.3 Why is Tokenization the Core of the Web3 Era?
To understand the importance of tokenization, we need to quickly review the three stages of internet development:
Web1 (Read-only Era): In the 1990s, the internet was a collection of static content, and users were readers of information;
Web2 (Read-Write Era): After 2000, social platforms emerged, users began creating and interacting, but platforms firmly held onto data and profits;
Web3 (Ownership Era): Decentralized networks give users true digital asset and data ownership, and tokenization is the key tool for achieving this 'user ownership.'
In the Web3 era, the significance of tokenization is reflected in three aspects:
1.3.1 Value can flow freely at all times.
Using USDC as an example, Circle announced that as of May 15, 2025, its circulating market value has stabilized around $60.49 billion, with on-chain transaction volume exceeding trillions of dollars. Funds can actually realize 'instantaneous transfer' without being restricted by bank hours, holidays, or regions, achieving unprecedented new heights in fund flow efficiency.
1.3.2 Assets can be infinitely divided, significantly lowering investment thresholds.
The rise of tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) has allowed ordinary people to access financial products that were originally just for high-net-worth individuals. For instance, Ondo Finance (see below) and BlackRock’s BUIDL fund are putting US Treasury bonds and money market funds on-chain, allowing participation for as little as a few dollars.
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) predicted in its 2023 report that by 2030, the global market for tokenized illiquid assets is expected to reach $16 trillion (see below).
By early 2025, the on-chain tokenization scale of US Treasury bonds alone had exceeded $7 billion (see below), and it continues to grow.
1.3.3 Assets can be combined and programmed, releasing space for innovation.
Tokenization not only brings liquidity but also possesses high composability and programmability like 'LEGO blocks.' Taking the Ethereum restaking protocol Ether.fi as an example, users who stake ETH can obtain eETH, which can be used as collateral for loans, investments, and other operations.
For example, Pendle Finance separates, prices, and trades future earnings, building complex financial instruments like on-chain fixed income and interest rate swaps. As of May 2025, data from DeFiLlama shows that yield token protocols like Pendle manage over $4 billion in assets (see below), showcasing the powerful financial innovation momentum brought by tokenization.
1.4 Challenges that Tokenization Still Needs to Overcome
Despite the broad prospects, tokenization still faces two core challenges:
The security of asset custody and compliance transparency.
How to ensure that off-chain assets are authentic, secure, and auditable? Current mainstream practices include regular third-party audits, on-chain reserve reports, and compliance custodial account systems, with regulatory frameworks gradually being established globally.
Risks of Oracles and Pricing Mechanisms
If the price oracle makes errors, it could lead to large-scale liquidation events on DeFi platforms. Current industry responses include using decentralized oracles (such as Chainlink) and adopting time-weighted average price mechanisms (TWAP), but the overall mechanism is still immature and requires continuous optimization.
Through the above analysis, we can see that it is tokenization that has driven the internet from a simple information carrier to a 'value internet' capable of exchanging real value. It has lowered the threshold for ordinary people to participate in high-value global investments and fundamentally changed the logic and speed of financial services.
When value can flow freely, the way platforms attract users will also change—from the traditional charging of users to directly sharing value with them. The airdrop economy is the best example of this transformation.
2. Airdrop Economy: The Value Leap from 'Users' to 'Shareholders'
If tokenization allows value to flow freely like information, then the rise of the airdrop economy has fundamentally rewritten the economic relationship between platforms and users.
We are undergoing an unprecedented revolution in business models—
From 'Users Pay' → to 'Free Use' → to 'Platforms Give Money.'
In this process, users are included in the core of profit distribution for the first time, truly upgrading from 'consumers' to 'co-builders' and 'beneficiaries.'
2.1 The Essence of the Airdrop Economy: Benefit Distribution + User Shareholder System
In the past, users paid for services; later, users used services for free, and platforms made money from advertisements. Now, decentralized platforms have taken it a step further: directly giving money to users.
This may sound like a fairy tale, but facts are better than imagination. The airdrop economy is about distributing tokens to early users, contributors, developers, and promoters, realizing the dividends that were originally monopolized by the platform and sinking them down to the users. These tokens represent future income dividends and grant users governance rights, constructing a new platform model similar to a 'user shareholder system.'
To understand the power of the airdrop economy, it might be helpful to view how it operates using the 'flywheel model':
Token airdrops initiate growth: platforms distribute a certain percentage of tokens free of charge to early users or contributors.
User earnings bring a sense of belonging: After receiving tokens, users not only enjoy the dividends of token price appreciation but also gain the identity of 'being part of the platform.'
Feeding back into the platform's activity and liquidity: As users increasingly engage with the platform, the total value locked (TVL), trading volume, and reputation all rise.
The platform's value increases, and the token price rises: Higher user engagement drives up the overall valuation and token price of the platform.
Attracting new users to continue pouring in: The positive cycle is triggered again, and token incentives become the engine of growth.
This logic is not theoretical but has already played out multiple times in reality.
2.2 Airdrop Economy: Becoming a New Paradigm for Value Discovery and Community Building in Web3
In traditional business logic, any form of capital investment, whether user incentive or promotional cashback, must go through precise input-output ratio (ROI) and customer acquisition cost (CAC) calculations. However, the 'airdrop economy' emerging in the Web3 field challenges this inherent thinking in a disruptive manner. It no longer follows the traditional path of 'contribution-based rewards' but advocates 'value first, trust-driven'—that is, distributing rights to potential users and contributors first, leveraging this to stimulate their future enthusiasm for participation and ecosystem building.
2.2.1 Uniswap: The 'Ownership Revolution' Triggered by Airdrop
The 2020 Uniswap airdrop event was a milestone practice of this new paradigm. It was not just a simple token distribution but was hailed as the '全民持股运动' (全民持股运动) in the crypto world. Every early user was pleasantly surprised to find 400 UNI tokens added to their wallets, which at the time were worth about $1,200 and exceeded $10,000 during the subsequent bull market.
The innovation of Uniswap lies in:
For the first time, the 'airdrop as advertising' has been verified on a large scale: It has been proven that directly allocating tokens to users is more effective in attracting liquidity (TVL sees explosive growth) and enhancing brand influence than traditional advertising.
Reshaping Governance Structures: Users are no longer just providers of liquidity or simple service users but have become 'shareholders' and direct participants in formulating platform rules and future developments by holding governance tokens like UNI. This marks a new attempt by open-source projects to transform community members into a core community of shared interests.
2.2.2 EigenLayer: Systematic Market Activation Driven by Expectations
The success of Uniswap kicked off the airdrop economy, while subsequent practitioners have pushed it to a more refined and strategic level. The re-staking protocol EigenLayer is a typical representative. It did not directly issue tokens in the early stages but successfully attracted large numbers of users to re-stake ETH originally locked in the Ethereum mainnet through the construction of a clever 'airdrop expectation' mechanism.
The strategy of EigenLayer showcases the evolution of the airdrop economy:
The powerful attraction of expected value: Before the official airdrop of the EIGEN token, its total locked value (TVL) had already surpassed $10 billion solely based on clear expectations and mechanism design.
The systemic market activation experiment: The first round of token distribution in April 2024 not only created a sensation in the crypto community but also directly ignited related sectors like 'modular security' and 'active verification services' (AVS). This has gone far beyond simple rewards, resembling a grand market experiment anchoring current participation and ecosystem building with future rights.
These large-scale, inclusive airdrops are not a game for a small circle of elites but aim for a broad 'consensus cold start.' They cover diverse ecological roles from ordinary users to developers and node operators, infusing the entire network with unprecedented vitality and participation.
2.2.3 The Airdrop Economy has Become the Core Engine of Web3 Narratives
From Uniswap's pioneering attempts to EigenLayer's innovative expectation management, we clearly see a trend: Airdrops are evolving from sporadic market actions into a core, systematic new paradigm in the Web3 field.
It is profoundly rewriting three core business propositions:
Where do users come from? — Transforming from 'purchased users' reliant on advertising to 'co-building partners' attracted by value.
How is the community formed? — Transforming from loosely aggregated interests to 'distributed companies' based on common interests and ownership.
Why does the platform grow? — Transforming from one-way service output to a positive flywheel driven by token economies and multi-party participation.
The essence of the airdrop economy goes far beyond the superficiality of 'issuing tokens.' It is a new organizational and incentive philosophy that views the community as a core asset, users as the driving engine, and tokens as the economic medium that connects everything. This perfectly encapsulates the classic vision of Web3: 'No longer attracting users through advertisements, but rather attracting value with value itself.'
2.3 The Far-reaching Impact of the Airdrop Economy
The emergence of the airdrop economy has restructured the fundamental relationship logic between platforms and users, and has opened a new door to win-win situations for creators and developers.
2.3.1 Change in Customer Acquisition Logic
In the traditional internet, platforms acquire customers in almost identical ways: burning money on ads, treating users as 'target objects' for advertising, and treating attention as 'commodity resources,' while fine-tuning ad placements and competing in bidding between Google and Facebook. The value of users has been defined from the start as 'conversion targets.'
But in the Web3 world, this model has been completely subverted.
Airdrops are no longer a way for platforms to pay intermediaries to acquire users; instead, they directly convert the money that should have gone to advertising giants into tokens and distribute them to users who genuinely use the product, are willing to share, and participate in building. This is a trust-based reverse incentive mechanism, where the platform is no longer 'finding people to advertise' but 'inviting users to be shareholders.'
2.3.2 Users have become shareholders.
This change brings not only a reversal of the customer acquisition logic but also a fundamental transformation of user identity. In the past, you were just a 'tenant' of the platform, using it and being easily replaceable.
And now, you begin to participate as a 'co-governing shareholder.' You are not just a user but also a contributor, promoter, and even a rule-maker and decision-maker. Holding platform tokens is akin to holding shares in a company, igniting a deeper motivation for participation and sense of belonging.
2.3.3 Bottom-level labor has become co-builders.
Deeper transformations are happening among creators and developers.
In the Web2 era, platforms controlled distribution channels and traffic entrances, and creators depended on them for survival but were often harvested; they helped platforms grow while watching them go public and cash in.
And in Web3, more and more protocols are reserving portions of tokens for incentivizing the 'bottom-level labor' of the ecosystem: content creators, independent developers, and operators running nodes. They are not outsourced employees but true 'co-builders'—exchanging contributions for shares and receiving dividends according to the protocol. Platforms are no longer walls to look up to but bridges to build together and share results.
This structural change has not only improved business models but also reshaped the fundamental logic of value distribution. Its deeper meaning lies in: the platform is no longer the center; the community is; users are no longer targets but partners; and all genuine growth now has its rightful owner.
2.4 Concerns of the Airdrop Economy: Beware of Bubbles and Abuse
Of course, this model also has its concerns:
Witch Attack: Some people maliciously register multiple accounts to extract airdrop benefits, disrupting fairness.
Bubbling: The rampant issuance of tokens and airdrops lacking real business support can easily lead to short-term speculation and long-term trust issues.
Regulatory Grey Area: Some countries have classified certain airdrops as securities issuance, putting related projects under legal pressure.
These issues remind us: Airdrops are not a universal remedy but rather a long-term incentive mechanism that needs careful design.
However, establishing an unprecedented win-win relationship with users through 'sharing money' rather than 'charging fees' is undoubtedly a significant advancement.
Furthermore, when users receive tokens, they do not simply 'sell' or 'hold for appreciation'—many will be attracted to start their own projects. Increasing numbers of people will find that, due to decentralization, innovation and entrepreneurship are no longer so out of reach.
3. Open-source Innovation: From Idea to Product, Just a Few Lines of Configuration
If tokenization clears the underlying network for value flow, the airdrop economy reshapes the value distribution model between platforms and users, then what truly accelerates innovation speed exponentially is the most powerful 'engine' of this era—open-source innovation.
This is an unprecedented paradigm shift: You don't need venture capital, you don't need a network of relationships, and you don't even need an office or servers. As long as you have a few open-source modules, a clear incentive mechanism, and a connected computer, you can ignite the future of an ecosystem.
But its establishment still stems from the three words 'decentralization.'
3.0 Open-source is an essential need for decentralization.
In a system without central censorship and absolute trusted intermediaries, any code that is not open-source means that no one can truly verify its safety and credibility—in other words, no one dares to use it.
Decentralization forces code to be open-source, and once it is open-source, it sets up a huge 'innovation diving board' in front of developers worldwide. This is not just about lowering thresholds; it directly reconstructs 'the productivity of innovation.'
Decentralization makes open-source a necessity, and open-source allows innovation to enter the flywheel. This path has never been so clear and has never been so close to every ordinary individual.
3.1 How Does This Mechanism Operate?
What does traditional entrepreneurship look like? You have a good idea, but first, you need to assemble a team, attract investment, build a backend, set up servers, connect payments, register a company, purchase trademarks, and run the market. Months go by, and just the 'preparatory work' drains most of your energy.
The Web3 world is completely different.
In this 'Onchain-as-a-Service' era, all infrastructure has been encapsulated by developers into reusable 'open-source building blocks': wallet logins, on-chain payments, NFT issuance, community governance, voting mechanisms, content distribution...
All you need to do is pull it down from GitHub and modify a few lines of configuration to complete the deployment. Especially with the maturation of modular blockchains (such as Celestia) and Layer 2 solutions (like Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack), developers can more easily customize and launch their own application chains.
Many times, the speed at which you build a new product is as fast as changing a phone case.
This is not just a change in technical structure, but a revolution in innovative paradigms.
Farcaster is a decentralized social protocol; it is not a single app but a 'social base' upon which anyone can freely build applications.
By early 2025, the Farcaster ecosystem experienced explosive growth on Coinbase's incubated Layer 2 network Base. With its innovative 'Frames' feature (allowing interactive applications to be embedded in the information stream), Farcaster's daily active users once exceeded 50,000, and the number of applications (mini-programs in Casts or independent clients) within the ecosystem surged to thousands. Many popular Frames applications can attract tens of thousands of user interactions within days, fully demonstrating the innovative speed brought by the combination of open-source protocols and high-performance underlying chains.
3.2 A Cliff-like Drop in Innovation Thresholds
For individual developers, the open-source innovation mechanism means:
Significantly reduced costs: All foundational modules are open-source, deployment relies on the chain, and entrepreneurship no longer requires extensive servers, operations, and centralized payments.
Speed increase: An idea goes from conception to launch in 'a few hours' rather than 'months.'
Clear return mechanism: Developers do not rely on 'waiting for acquisition' but earn by distributing tokens through protocols, community incentives, or even on-chain dividends.
According to an influential analysis by the crypto investment firm Variant Fund (its views continue to be validated in 2024-2025): the average startup cost for Web3 developers has dropped by over 90%, while the code reuse rate has increased by nearly 80%. This means:
Creativity is a core asset, while capital and connections are being marginalized.
3.3 Potential Risks: Fast Speed ≠ No Risks
Of course, the greater the advantage of the open-source flywheel, the higher the potential risks involved:
Long chain dependencies: The open-source module you use may depend on another module. If any component is attacked or goes down, the entire product chain may be affected.
Legal grey area: Not all open-source codes are 'free to use.' Different open-source licenses (like MIT, GPL, Apache) impose various constraints on commercial use, and unauthorized use may face infringement risks.
Security issues: Code reuse also means vulnerability reuse. Once unaudited contracts go live, they may become a hacker's ATM. (In 2024, several major thefts occurred due to re-entrancy attacks or oracle manipulation, ringing alarm bells again.)
Therefore, even as we enter the 'flywheel era,' basic auditing, testing, and legal compliance remain indispensable.
Writing this, it is not hard to find:
In Web2, you need to build organizations to innovate; in Web3, you only need an idea and then hand it over to the community to realize it together.
Decentralization has given 'creativity' itself monetary value, and it has also made all wild ideas rapidly realizable.
This also directly connects with the previous two flywheels: The new applications you create will bring new assets, new users, and new value, thereby generating new tokens, starting new airdrops, attracting new contributors... Ultimately, you yourself also become part of the flywheel.
This is the new paradigm of Web3 innovation.
4. The Logical Closed Loop of Decentralized Business Models?
You may have already sensed that tokenization, the airdrop economy, and the open-source innovation flywheel are not three unrelated trends—they are interconnected by a very strong logical closed loop.
This is not a coincidence but a whole new way of economic organization.
4.1 How Positive Feedback is Formed
The original essence of the internet was the free flow of information. The essence of Web3 is to let value flow like information.
Step 1: Tokenization, allowing everything to be 'priced' and freely circulated.
Tokenization allows value to have a specific 'format' and 'address' on the chain, enabling any asset to be split, transferred, and combined—from physical to abstract, from local to global, everything can be put on-chain.
You can use USDC for cross-border payments, use stETH for lending, invest in tokenized US Treasury bonds with BlackRock’s BUIDL, or even tokenize and monetize 'non-mainstream assets' like attention, storage space, bandwidth, and the security of restaking (such as EigenLayer's AVS).
Everything starts with 'on-chain pricing.'
Step 2: Airdrop economy, directly distributing value to ordinary people.
With tokens, the issue of 'value attribution' naturally arises.
In the traditional internet, users create value while platforms capture value. You work hard to watch videos, like and comment, and refer people to register, but in the end, it’s the platforms and capital that make big money.
The airdrop mechanism in Web3 has fundamentally changed the path of value distribution: It is no longer about spending on ads to buy traffic but rather 'giving money' directly to users in exchange for loyalty.
Projects like EigenLayer, Starknet, and Wormhole have proven one thing: If you want to attract new users, the most effective way is not 'telling stories' but 'sharing money.'
Thus, a new entrepreneurial logic was born:
First, build an on-chain application at low cost using open-source modules, then attract early users and contributors with token airdrops. As popularity rises, TVL increases, token appreciation occurs, leading to market attention and traffic siphoning.
Airdrops are not just benefits; they are the ignition switch for this flywheel.
Step 3: The open-source innovation flywheel, allowing new products to continuously emerge.
With tokens as 'fuel' and users and funds as the 'engine,' the rest is to ignite rounds of innovation.
The open-source innovation flywheel precisely addresses the most painful point for Web2 entrepreneurs: the resource threshold is too high, and the speed is too slow.
Now you don't need to develop a wallet system, deploy backend servers, or handle payment settlements.
Everything has been modularized, just waiting for you to 'assemble the puzzle.'
The lowering of innovation thresholds + the openness of token incentive mechanisms has allowed countless developers worldwide to begin 'entrepreneurship via code,' enabling even one person to start a company and even one idea to become an application.
Thus, on-chain innovation has experienced an unprecedented explosion.
For example:
On Farcaster’s Frames application, one idea can attract tens of thousands of user interactions in a matter of days;
Applications built on modular blockchains (such as Celestia Tia) or OP Stack announce or launch new projects on average every week;
The Restaking ecosystem (such as the AVS project on EigenLayer) has seen a core protocol drive the emergence of dozens of projects, continually distributing incentives through points and airdrop expectations.
These 'projects' will ultimately form new assets, accumulate new value, and further tokenize, initiating a new cycle of growth.
4.2 The Ecological Flywheel is Spinning Rapidly
When we string these three together, we see an astonishing picture:
Tokenization: All value now has a digital expression that can flow freely on-chain;
Airdrop Economy: Users, creators, and developers gain value attribution through incentive mechanisms;
Open-source innovation flywheel: New projects constantly emerge, driving the birth of new scenarios, new assets, and new applications...
Then, these new applications will derive new tokenizable values, triggering a new round of airdrops, attracting more people to join and forming the next wave of innovation.
This structure does not grow linearly but rather explodes exponentially. It is not 'the rise of a product' but 'the self-replication of an ecosystem.'
It resembles an endlessly accelerating spiral—
One protocol can give birth to a token;
One token can ignite an ecosystem;
An ecosystem can give rise to a new economic order.
Therefore, the true value of decentralization is not just 'data on-chain' or 'breaking intermediaries,' but for the first time:
Making the creation, distribution, and transmission of value incredibly efficient;
Allowing countless individuals to collaborate without relying on systems or organizations, solely based on consensus and incentive mechanisms;
Allowing innovation to self-replicate and self-evolve at an astonishing speed, forming a 'societal-level release of productivity.'
This is not a technological revolution; it is a brand-new institutional revolution.
Conclusion: The Future is Here
When we look back at these three articles, a clear thread gradually emerges:
In the first article, we stripped away the veil of 'pseudo-decentralization,' showing that no matter how many chains or how flashy the code, if you still entrust your lifeline to centralized cloud services and traditional platforms, what is called 'freedom' is merely wrapping paper, an illusion.
In the second article, we dissected the true 'underlying logic of decentralization': distributed ledgers, incentive mechanisms, and governance systems, which together build a more stable, trustworthy, and censorship-resistant new order.
And today, we finally answer that most fundamental question:
'What does this have to do with you?'
The answer is: Relationships have grown.
Decentralization is not a technical ideal that distances itself from reality but a power reconstruction happening right beside you and me. It will directly influence:
Can you participate in the appreciation dividends of global assets with a smaller principal?
Can you bypass intermediaries and become a shareholder of the platform instead of a 'tool person'?
Can you use an idea, stitch together a few modules, and have it run globally without needing financing, networking, or waiting for approvals?
In the era of Web2, we were 'users'—data was collected, attention was extracted, and terms were passively accepted.
And in the era of Web3, we can finally become 'co-builders,' 'partners,' and 'governors'—truly meaningful stakeholders.
This is the first time in history that ordinary people have the ability to participate in 'institutional design' at an extremely low threshold.
Not through voting boxes, not through petitions, but through 'wallets + signatures,' by holding a certain token, participating in a DAO, or simply being an early user of a certain protocol, one can become a co-builder of the new round of systems and orders.
Ultimately, the decentralization revolution is not just a change in technical architecture, but a change in how value is generated, distributed, and who decides it.
Although the passage of the US stablecoin act has introduced new variables for decentralization, the true meaning of decentralization lies in:
For the first time, the power, benefits, and future that were once only in the hands of large companies and big capital have fallen into the hands of ordinary people.
This is a reconstruction of production relations.
This is a descent of underlying power.
This represents a thorough paradigm shift in the 'platform-user' relationship.
And we are precisely in the front row of this transformation.
You don't need to be a programmer or a miner. You simply need to realize:
This era is already different.
The next round of era dividends will not be in the hands of those platforms that have already occupied the territory, but in the hands of those willing to participate, willing to learn, and willing to exchange action for equity.
Who does the future belong to? It does not belong to giants, nor to those who knew early, but to those who dare to 'act after knowing early.'
The Decentralization Trilogy concludes here.
But your own path to decentralization may just be beginning.
Where should you start?
If you are a newcomer, you might start with the zero-foundation tutorial collection I compiled to quickly acquire the necessary skills while participating in a few zero-cost airdrop projects, building your initial assets and cognitive accumulation at the smallest cost.
If you are already a seasoned Web3 player, welcome to join the Alpha Planet we are building, where a group of frontline explorers will gather, and together we will uncover the true decentralization dividends and seek the next Alpha project with explosive potential.
This time, do not be a bystander.
Are you ready?
Following Black Cat, with precise strategic analysis and millions in AI big data selection, can you secure an undefeated position? The market never rejects opportunities; the question is whether you can seize them. By following experienced people and the right crowd, we can earn more!
