The Selling Out of Decentralization Decentralization was supposed to be rebellion — a digital uprising against the gatekeepers of finance and data. A way to give power back to people. Now, it’s just a new kind of marketing campaign. What began as a movement for freedom turned into a spectacle of greed. The rhetoric stayed radical, but the behavior got corporate fast. Talk of “community ownership” quietly morphed into “token incentives.” What was once anti-establishment became airdrop culture — capitalism with better branding. The irony is vicious Web3 started by promising to break the system but ended up replicating it — only faster and with worse UX. Decentralization once meant transparency, autonomy, and resilience. Now it means Discord servers filled with speculation, influencers masquerading as economists, and founders building new empires on the ashes of old ones. The same power dynamics, just distributed through wallets instead of banks. The dream of collective power collapsed under the weight of individual profit. Because when everyone’s in it for yield, nobody’s in it for freedom. The Web3 revolution didn’t get crushed by regulators or skeptics — it got sold out by its believers. The crypto economy turned participation into gamified capitalism, and the “community” into unpaid labor for hype. The deeper tragedy isn’t the scams or the rug pulls — those were predictable. It’s how easily people traded idealism for incentives. How a movement built on “trustless systems” forgot that trust — in each other, not code — was the original point. Decentralization didn’t fail because it couldn’t work. It failed because it stopped being about liberation and became about distribution — not of power, but of profit. The revolution was real for a second. Then someone built a dashboard for it, raised a Series A, and launched an NFT drop. That’s not freedom. That’s franchising. From Anarchy to Airdrops was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this storyThe Selling Out of Decentralization Decentralization was supposed to be rebellion — a digital uprising against the gatekeepers of finance and data. A way to give power back to people. Now, it’s just a new kind of marketing campaign. What began as a movement for freedom turned into a spectacle of greed. The rhetoric stayed radical, but the behavior got corporate fast. Talk of “community ownership” quietly morphed into “token incentives.” What was once anti-establishment became airdrop culture — capitalism with better branding. The irony is vicious Web3 started by promising to break the system but ended up replicating it — only faster and with worse UX. Decentralization once meant transparency, autonomy, and resilience. Now it means Discord servers filled with speculation, influencers masquerading as economists, and founders building new empires on the ashes of old ones. The same power dynamics, just distributed through wallets instead of banks. The dream of collective power collapsed under the weight of individual profit. Because when everyone’s in it for yield, nobody’s in it for freedom. The Web3 revolution didn’t get crushed by regulators or skeptics — it got sold out by its believers. The crypto economy turned participation into gamified capitalism, and the “community” into unpaid labor for hype. The deeper tragedy isn’t the scams or the rug pulls — those were predictable. It’s how easily people traded idealism for incentives. How a movement built on “trustless systems” forgot that trust — in each other, not code — was the original point. Decentralization didn’t fail because it couldn’t work. It failed because it stopped being about liberation and became about distribution — not of power, but of profit. The revolution was real for a second. Then someone built a dashboard for it, raised a Series A, and launched an NFT drop. That’s not freedom. That’s franchising. From Anarchy to Airdrops was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story