SCIENCEThe Internet Just Changed Hands and Most People Missed It5 min read

Who Stands to Gain

For businesses, the opportunity is tokenization — converting real assets and revenue streams into programmable digital instruments that can be traded, fractionalized, or automated. For creators, it’s direct monetization without platform intermediaries taking the lion’s share. For investors, decentralized infrastructure sits at the intersection of finance, software, and political economy in a way that hasn’t existed before.

The early internet created enormous wealth for the people who built the platforms. Web 3.0’s central argument is that the next wave of value should flow to the people who actually use them. Whether that argument wins is still being decided — in code, in courts, and in the daily choices of a few hundred million users who are only now starting to realize the deal they were offered has changed.