The Foreign Service Journal, April 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2023 29 models for incentives and governance to rethink the fundamental relationships like the customer to the bank, the musician to the streaming platform, or the individual to their identity documents. As I’ve mentioned, the models and advancements in crypto—like NFTs, decentralized finance (DeFi), and self-managed identity, among other cases—are asking us to rethink who controls what data, value, and information, and why . In the past few years, Web3 and crypto have been ubiquitous topics in conversations around digital innovation—but what are they exactly? Broadly speaking, we can think of Web1 as the “Read” era, Web2 as the “Write” era, and Web3 as the “Own” era. So, in the first iteration of the internet, we could view informa- tion from across the world. In the second iteration, we could add to it—largely through platforms and intermediaries. Now, we can own assets and transfer value, without the need for the intermediaries of the past. From an overarching perspective, Web3 represents a vision for the future; it focuses on creating solutions to issues associated with centralized economies such as lack of privacy protection, data ownership, and misuse of data by intermediaries like social media platforms or financial services companies, which we have seen many examples of in recent history. At its core, Web3 describes a decentralized future—one where tech serves as a tool designed to empower users to protect our data, along with greater transparency regarding privacy and usage policies within our digital economy. Crypto factors into this movement, positioning itself as not just another technological advancement but instead seeking to reimagine the relationship we have with technology in general (among many other implications). The Web2 and platform era was based on centralization of ownership and data, while Web3 is focused on putting these aspects back into the hands of the users. Crypto-enabled incentive and governance models are central to that shift. The key takeaway here: Web3 and crypto are intertwined. In an ever-connected world, Web3 will allow for global seam- less value transfer and access across industries and sectors: in creative fields such as music, art, and others; in financial use