SEC Sues Uniswap: The Ideological Battle Over Web3's Core Values and Cyberspace
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SEC Sues Uniswap: The Ideological Battle Over Web3's Core Values and Cyberspace
The SEC's pre-litigation notice against Uniswap highlights the unique nature of Web3's core values.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: @Web3Mario
Introduction
This morning, I woke up to an interesting news flash: Uniswap founder Hayden Adams tweeted that Uniswap Labs had received a Wells Notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). He expressed confidence that their products are legal and that their work stands on the right side of history. However, it's clear that for some time now, instead of establishing clear and sensible rules, the SEC has chosen to focus on attacking long-term builders like Uniswap and Coinbase.
A Wells Notice refers to an informal warning issued by the SEC before initiating civil proceedings against a publicly listed company in the U.S. Companies receiving such notices can communicate and negotiate with the SEC before formal litigation begins. This immediately reminded me of a reflective essay I wrote two years ago about Web3. I believe that with the approval of Bitcoin ETFs and the subsequent influx of traditional capital into the crypto space, similar events will become increasingly common. At the heart of this phenomenon lies the unique core value of Web3—and the resulting ideological struggle within cyberspace. It’s the weekend, so I hope to offer something thoughtful and free-flowing.
Main Text
Every technology embeds ideological biases—its tendency to construct the world in one way rather than another, or to assign higher value to certain things. The competition between new and old technologies is a battle for time, attention, money, and prestige—primarily for dominance of their respective worldviews. This kind of competition is characteristic of intense ideological conflict.
—Neil Postman, *Technopoly*
Professor Postman is a scholar I deeply respect, one of the pioneers of media ecology who dedicated his career to exploring the relationship between technology and culture. The opening quote comes from his 1990s book *Technopoly*. Today, this remarkably prescient insight is being validated once again by a digital revolution known as Web3.
I believe most people familiar with Web3 were initially drawn in by the industry’s many wealth myths. Massive investments are making this market appear like a “new world full of gold.” But amid the excitement, I urge everyone to pause and consider a fundamental question: What is Web3’s core value? Is it low-cost financial services enabled by cryptocurrency? Privacy protection through asymmetric encryption? Or perhaps the redistribution of ownership over the internet? Your answer to this question will profoundly influence your actions within Web3 and shape its future trajectory—making it well worth deep reflection.
What Is the Context of the Web3 Debate?
In fact, debates about Web3’s value have persisted for years, and even defining Web3 clearly remains a significant challenge. Before diving into its core values, let’s review several representative perspectives to establish a consistent context for what follows.
First, here are three widely recognized viewpoints from Web3 supporters. The first comes from Josh Stark, affiliated with the Ethereum Foundation:
Web 3 is a group of technologies that restructure control over the internet, include more than just cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and other products of cryptoeconomic design.
The second comes from Chris Dixon, general partner at a16z—one of Web3’s largest investors:
Web3 is the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens. In web3, ownership and control is decentralized. Users and builders can own pieces of internet services by owning tokens, both non-fungible (NFTs) and fungible.
The third comes from Thomas Stackpole, senior editor at Harvard Business Review:
Web3 is being touted as the future of the internet. The vision for this new, blockchain-based web includes cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, decentralized finance, and more. It offers a read/write/own version of the web, in which users have a financial stake in and more control over the web communities they belong to.
From these views, we can extract two key points. First, Web3 is a vision—not a fixed technical architecture or business model. Second, the essence of this vision is transforming the current paradigm of ownership and control on the web, emphasizing user autonomy and independence in the digital world. A classic Web3 example is users reclaiming ownership of their digital assets from third-party platforms.
Take the quintessential Web2 company Twitter. Since user-generated data is exclusively controlled by the platform, it profits via advertising-driven revenue models. Yet, this value should rightfully belong to users—the actual producers of the data. By leveraging closed ecosystems, platforms monopolize data and extract user value. This is a standard critique of Web2 from a Web3 practitioner’s perspective.
Guided by this vision, Web3 project design principles seem to have taken shape. On Ethereum’s official website—widely seen as the most representative Web3 infrastructure—we find the following:
- Web3 is decentralized: Instead of large parts of the internet being controlled and owned by centralized entities, ownership is distributed among builders and users.
- Web3 is permissionless: Everyone has equal access to participate; no one is excluded.
- Web3 has native payments: It uses cryptocurrency for spending and sending money online instead of relying on outdated banking and payment processor infrastructure.
- Web3 is trustless: It operates using incentives and economic mechanisms instead of relying on trusted third parties.
On the other hand, Web3 critics are equally vocal. Here are three representative counterpoints. The first comes from Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Signal:
Decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer to the ideal outcome as the days become less early.
The second comes from Stephen Diehl, a software developer and staunch critic of cryptocurrency:
At its core web3 is a vapid marketing campaign that attempts to reframe the public’s negative associations of crypto assets into a false narrative about disruption of legacy tech company hegemony. The blockchain offers nothing new or worthwhile to the universe of technology. It’s a one trick pony whose only application is creating censorship resistant crypto investment schemes, an invention whose negative externalities and capacity for harm vastly outweigh any possible uses.
The third comes from Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter:
You don’t own “web3.” The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.
These critiques are representative. The first questions the significance of decentralized networks, arguing that decentralization is largely a pseudo-need for web users. Compared to decentralization, users care more about efficiency in information exchange. Moreover, many so-called successful Web3 companies today fail to uphold this principle, merely leveraging its marketing appeal.
The second challenges the technical flaws of blockchain—the foundational infrastructure of Web3. Critics argue that as a "distributed database" technology, blockchain is a failure because it does not improve—and often severely degrades—query and insertion efficiency, a key metric for evaluating databases.
The third expresses concern about Web3’s current hyper-financialization. These critics typically acknowledge the value of decentralization but argue that Web3’s excessive reliance on cryptocurrency has trapped it in a state of hyper-financialization. This makes the industry vulnerable to economic cycles and risks recreating centralized power structures through capital concentration.
The above provides essential background on Web3’s current state. You’ll notice that resolving these disputes hinges on clarifying Web3’s core value. My answer: Web3 signifies the maturation of cyberspace (or, using a trendier term, the metaverse). As the internet occupies an ever-larger share of human life, Web3 offers a relatively complete ideological framework and practical technical blueprint for the digital realm. From now on, ideology and technical performance will jointly serve as reference dimensions for future internet development. In short, Web3’s core value is cultural.
Three Stages of Cyberspace Development
Cyberspace is an old concept. The term first appeared in 1960 in the artwork of Danish artist Susanne Ussing, though its meaning then was vastly different from today’s usage, so we won’t dwell on it. It wasn’t until 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, that the concept—championed by cyber-libertarians—evolved into its modern form: “Cyberspace is the feeling of a social environment existing purely within representational and communicative space… entirely within computer space, spread across increasingly complex and fluid networks.”
Indeed, I view the evolution of Web technologies as essentially the realization of cyberspace—bringing this concept from fiction into reality. Based on users’ collaborative relationships and modes of information exchange, this development can be broadly divided into three stages (apologies, but the Web+number naming convention doesn’t fully capture my point, so I’ve adopted alternative labels):
(1) The Classical Liberal Web Era
Rewind to 1989. Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web marked humanity’s formal entry into the information age (aided also by Microsoft’s release of the first Multimedia PC standard). Through this internet-accessible system of interconnected hypertext documents, we achieved low-cost, high-speed, long-distance transmission of information.
Thanks to the relaxed political climate and wave of globalization at the time, we established internet technical standards based on open protocols. Crucially, open protocols are not owned by any single company or nation—they function like neutral infrastructure, akin to physical laws in the material world.
Anyone could use three simple technologies—Uniform Resource Identifiers (URLs), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)—to engage in low-frequency information exchange on the Web (think of the experience of personal blogs and email). Users were typically peers—both builders and users of the network. Information exchange relied directly on open protocols, and individuals could freely publish and retrieve information according to their will. We call this phase the Classical Liberal Web Era.
However, as ethical issues emerged online—ransomware, drugs, child pornography—governments intensified content censorship. The primary contradiction during this stage lay between the principle of open protocols and government regulation. Most netizens believed personal freedom was essential to the internet’s development, and any management measures undermining this freedom were seen as violations of openness. Various cyber-libertarian groups and institutions emerged, with iconic works like “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” symbolizing this era. These Silicon Valley left-wing elites had political aspirations, but given the internet’s early stage and limited role in daily life, their following remained small and growth slow. For most people, network technology was simply a fast messaging tool—little different from the telephone.
(2) The Technocratic Monopoly Web Era
Next, cyberspace entered a period of rapid technological advancement, evolving in two directions: expanding the types of information the Web could carry to deliver richer, more immersive experiences (e.g., WebSockets, AJAX, streaming media), and lowering technical barriers to reduce costs and improve interaction efficiency (e.g., Nginx, Apache, Caddy).
As web technologies exploded in complexity, mastering them became increasingly difficult. With growing specialization and sophistication, users began to stratify. By motivation, they split into two broad groups: end users, who prioritized efficient information exchange, and tech providers, who sought profit by offering affordable, high-performance tools and services. Over time, information exchange became dependent on services provided by tech suppliers—hence this phase is known as the Technocratic Monopoly Era. Tech companies lured experts with high salaries to achieve technological monopolies and reap outsized profits. This culminated with the rise of social media and advertising-driven revenue models, forming a seemingly win-win triad of users, tech providers, and advertisers.
As user numbers grew and data types diversified, the internet occupied a larger share of social life—amplifying the harms of privacy breaches and illegal surveillance. The Snowden revelations detonated this issue. The central contradiction shifted to that between users and tech oligarchs, rooted in data privacy.
Some technologists argued that the root problem was the monopoly of network resources by tech giants under the dominant web architecture, who profited by exploiting users’ private data—an intolerable situation. Thus, a fundamental overhaul of underlying web technologies was needed. Indeed, this was Gavin Wood’s original vision for Web3.0—a vision of a “post-Snowden web”:
Web 3.0, or as might be termed the “post-Snowden” web, is a re-imagination of the sorts of things we already use the web for, but with a fundamentally different model for the interactions between parties. Information that we assume to be public, we publish. Information we assume to be agreed upon, we place on a consensus ledger. Information that we assume to be private, we keep secret and never reveal. Communication always takes place over encrypted channels and only with pseudonymous identities as endpoints; never with anything traceable (such as IP addresses).
I see this as a milestone: the first time we applied a relatively complete ideological framework to envision the development of digital society and guide technological innovation. In effect, it resembled an anarchist-guided digital social system. Prior to this, technological progress had focused almost exclusively on cost optimization and efficiency gains.
(3) The Ideological Cyberspace Era
To avoid confusion with political philosophy, I should clarify: here, “ideology” refers to a philosophy of network building, not real-world political goals. I believe we have now entered the Ideological Cyberspace Era—a period defined by broad recognition of cyberspace as a vital part of human life. New cyber ideologies (or philosophies of network construction) and corresponding digital governance models are becoming fresh drivers of technological development. From now on, the digital world will fragment along ideological lines, while maintaining weak interconnections.
In this era, cyberspace development is unlikely to follow a single, exclusive path—which is why I dislike the term Web3. The trajectory will resemble the evolution of political philosophy after the Enlightenment. But unlike past revolutions, the spirit of open protocols in network infrastructure ensures this will be a bottom-up process. Building a new digital society is now low-cost and doesn’t require violent upheaval. Cyber ideologies and governance models will proliferate over time, and different digital societies will compete to attract residents by showcasing their unique advantages.
The Leftward Shift of the Cyber Ideology Spectrum and the Digital Migration Wave
With this developmental arc in mind, let’s reflect on the major cyber ideologies that have emerged throughout the internet’s evolution (to be analyzed in greater depth in future articles):
Classical Liberal Network: A philosophy advocating that individual free speech trumps all else. It holds that excessive censorship harms digital society and thus supports building neutral infrastructure based on open principles.
Technocratic Authoritarian Network: A utilitarian philosophy viewing the digital world as a product offered by technologists to non-technologists. Its primary goal is commercial gain through rich-featured, high-performance networks.
Anarchist Network: A philosophy opposing all forms of authority—technical or political—believing no centralized organization or solution can yield a fair digital society. Advocates build decentralized infrastructure (I believe this accurately describes the post-Snowden vision of Web3).
Free-Market Capitalist Network: A monetization-driven philosophy asserting that private ownership of digital assets and unregulated free markets are key to a fairer cyberspace. Proponents design crypto-based monetary policies and economic systems to distribute power in digital societies (I believe this captures the hyper-financialized vision of Web3).
We cannot predict what novel cyber ideologies may emerge or which will prevail in this great contest. But I believe it’s valuable to propose an analytical framework—a Cyber Ideology Spectrum, analogous to the political spectrum. It allows preliminary positioning of specific ideologies and helps assess users’ ideological leanings, thereby forecasting future trajectories.
As shown, the horizontal axis represents immersion in cyberspace. The further left, the greater the proportion of digital life in social life and the higher the dependence on the network. Far-left groups are often called CyberPunks—they feel they live entirely within digital worlds. Far-right groups are “network instrumentalists,” who believe the digital world doesn’t truly exist and that networks are merely tools for transmitting information. The vertical axis represents the classic political-cultural dimension (authority vs. freedom).
Within this framework, you can observe the distribution of the aforementioned cyber ideologies. Notably, there’s a clear leftward trend. I believe this shift will accelerate with advances in immersive technologies—VR, AR, metaverse—and soon trigger a stunning wave of migration among digital citizens. We don’t yet know which ideology will become dominant, but one thing is certain: superior institutional design—whether through higher returns, stronger user engagement, or better privacy—will be the decisive factor in winning this ideological battle.
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@web3_mario
