I joined web3 in 2015 because the idea of civil disobedience, censorship resistance, and downtime immunity seemed mouth-wateringly good.
I loved the fact that this new web allows you to say "No" when someone tells you "give me your money" or "take down that content".
NO, FUCK YOU.
Over time, though, web3 morphed into... well... you know.
Come 2019, and nothing is as it was supposed to be. We were supposed to be in "Demolition Man"'s version of LA, and we ended up in "Escape from L.A.". Or is it the other way around actually? 🤔
Either way, it's not good.
By 2026, things hadn't improved.
Honest question: which idealistic web3 project is left?
— Bruno Skvorc (@bitfalls) January 20, 2026
Apart from eth, which project even cares about decentralisation or censorship resistance? Of those that say they do, how many are actually honest about the tradeoffs they made to get to where they are?
They had deteriorated to the point of every single L2 being a centralized server, entire "protocols" earning $7 in fees, and every manner of app - social or otherwise - now finally getting a little more honest and pivoting to gambling.
The civil disobedience I once wanted to direct at the world - at the tax man, at the cake of corruption where each layer of our feudalist society siphons a bit more from your income, at the politicians who argue that multiculturalism is fine as long as they don't have to live in a mixed community - now had a new target.
I had developed a lot of projects over the past 10 years and tried to push my idealism into things where it didn't belong.
After all, I was adamantly against "mArKeTiNg" at RMRK which ultimately ruined it, because we didn't pay higher caste retards to dump on lower caste retards. I insisted we decentralize Singular as much as possible, which ended up in it being a mess of hard to upgrade sluggishness and overcentralized mega-infra that any IT Karen could be envious of.
I worked for companies which outright lie about decentralization, work against it, and even destroy projects for private interests.
There's no way to justify this. I had (have?) skills. I could have gone into an honest industry. I could have built something good. But there's no money in building good.
There's only money in building casinos when you're in a casino factory.
So I half-way retardmaxxed. Went with the flow. Accumulation phase. Escape the permanent underclass, all that.
I would develop something fun, decentralized, interesting on the side, but never seriously.
Now, I'm taking it a bit more seriously.
Value.eth is a project that should live for as long as the chains I deployed it on live.
It's a smart contract for permanent or temporary locking of Uniswap LP tokens, such that it still allows you to collect fees, but not withdraw the liquidity out. This effectively means you're locking part of the supply forever.
The domain value.eth is powered by ENS, one of the very, very few web3 projects that tries to stay permanent and decentralized (alebit with the new ENS chain I'm not sure what'll happen), and the domain is paid up in advance for 40 years. Anyone can extend it if I die. The Arweave counterpart is permanently bought, so shouldn't ever expire.
You can access the URL in any ENS-enabled browser like Opera or Brave, or you can append ".link" and access it via value.eth.link. "eth.link" is a domain owned and operated by ENS, so they do the forwarding for you. If that fails, value.eth.limo also works. In theory, they could DNS-swap your frontend for something malicious, yes, so you should probably try to access via value.eth directly whenever possible, or if that doesn't work, through the IPFS hash that is registered to the ENS name.
To access this IPFS hash, you can just inspect the ENS domain: https://app.ens.domains/value.eth - use the contenthash in any IPFS gateway and you're good to go.
The IPFS content is hosted through Filebase, which admittedly is another single-point-of-failure. If no one with an IPFS node visits this website in some amount of time, AND Filebase goes down, the frontend is dead. This is why I've also added Arweave hosting to it, so you can access the app through value.ar.io or any other gateway that will resolve ar://value.
You can also grab the raw HTML content and run the page locally through tools like ipfsviewer.
The deployment process is fully local - I run "bun run deploy" and the frontend is minimized, pushed to IPFS and Arweave and the contenthash on ENS updated - for as long as I still have access to my wallets.
Even if the frontend goes down completely, the contracts are verified on all chains they've been deployed to, so they can be directly interacted with on any block explorer, or through the interface, which also makes it trivial to integrate Value with any DEX, launchpad, or project in general.
It sounds convoluted but in many ways it's ridiculously simple - like we used to have it. It used to be that you could revisit a website you visited in Internet Explorer 7 weeks ago, and if it was still in your "Temporary Internet Files" folder, it would load, even offline. That's how things are supposed to work. That's how value.eth works. And that's how most of my future "idealism" launches are going to work.
Progressive Centralization.
So, check out Value if you're interested. Also check out Pingui.io if you're interested. There will be more soon. And if you want to build on top of this template, I'll publish it soon so you too can launch middleman-resistant projects.
Does this mean I'm back to being an idealist?
No of course not. I now accept the Darwinian nature of web3. I now look forward to taking the retards' money in this PvP arena we call "work". It is still the accumulation phase. I'll go to work for the most centralized L2 out there and pretend I like it, like a good soldier.
But while I'm doing that, I'll put my skills to good use and try to build unstoppable things. It's the only way to justify staying in this industry.