In 2014, there was a vision: you can have permissionless, decentralized applications that could support finance, social media, ride sharing, governing organizations, crowdfunding, potentially create an entire alternative web, all on the backs of a suite of technologies.

Ethereum: the blockchain. The world computer that could give any application its shared memory.

Whisper: the data layer. Messages too expensive for a blockchain, that do no need consensus.

Swarm: the storage layer. Store files for long-term access.

Over the last five years, this core vision has at times become obscured, with various “metas” and “narratives” at various times taking center stage. But the core vision has never died. And in fact, the core technologies behind it are only growing stronger.

Ethereum is now proof of stake. Ethereum is now scaling, it is now cheap, and it is on track to get more scalable and cheaper thanks to the power of ZK-EVMs. Thanks to ZK-EVM + PeerDAS, the “sharding” vision is effectively being realized. And L2s can give additional and different kinds of gains in speed on top.

Whisper is now Waku (https://docs.waku.org/), and already powers many applications (eg. https://www.railway.xyz/, https://status.app/ just to name two I use). Even outside of Waku, the quality of decentralized messaging has increased. Fileverse (decentralized Google Docs and Sheets alternative: https://fileverse.io/) has seen massive gains in usability over the past year.

IPFS is now highly performant and robust as a decentralized way of retrieving files, though IPFS alone does not solve the storage problem. Hence, there is still room to improve there.

All of the prerequisites for the original web3 vision are here, in full force, and are continuing to get stronger over the next few years. Hence, it’s time to buidl, and buidl decentralized.

Fileverse is an excellent example of the right way to do things:

  • It uses Ethereum and Gnosis Chain for what they are good for: names, accounts and permissioning, document registration
  • It uses decentralized messaging and file storage to store documents and propagate changes to documents
  • The application passes the walkaway test: https://github.com/fileverse/walk-away-ddocs (even if Fileverse disappears, you can still retrieve them and even keep editing them with the open source UI)

This is what we mean by “build a hammer that is a tool you buy once and it’s yours, not a corposlop AI dishwasher that requires you to register for a google account and charges a subscription fee per month for extra washing modes, and probably spies on you and stops working if you get politically disfavored by a foreign country”.

If you think this criticism of corposlop is hyperbolic, well turns out, it’s literally a concatenation of these three:

In 2014, decentralized applications were toys, hundreds of times more difficult to use in web2. In 2026, fileverse is now usable enough that I regularly write documents in it and send them to other people to collaborate. The decentralized renaissance is coming, and you can be part of making it happen.

Just sharing it here from reddit, all credits to the original author u/vbuterin

  • Ferk@lemmy.ml
    3·
    9 hours ago

    What about quantum computing having the potential to break traditional encryption and mess up the whole thing? I wouldn’t want to be too invested into any one particular blockchain tech until that gets solved.

    • lystytsiaverschmitzt@anarchist.nexusOPEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      This is active area of research and development. As far as I am aware, we currently have the efforts on Lean Ethereum, which is kind of a longer term effort of bringing deeper improvements to make Ethereum efficient and secure for the long term, by replacing a lot of sub-optimal components with components that are known to be much closer to optimal, like zk-snarks (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge)

      A significant component of lean Ethereum is to future-proof the consensus layer (CL) and data layer (DL), replacing BLS and KZG with post-quantum equivalents

      The community is currently focused on hash-based constructions as the leading post-quantum option, but a healthy diversity of views is expected and welcome, as I’m already hearing about lattice-based options

      A few months ago, lean client teams were sprinting towards a post-quantum devnet as discussed during beam day Cannes in 2025 EthCC

      https://xcancel.com/ladislaus0x/status/1994342897152311665

      Transcription of above tweets:

      @ladislaus0x Ethereum consensus will eventually have to switch to post-quantum (PQ) signatures — and early R&D efforts look promising!
      PQ signatures pose a challenge as they are ~30x larger than today’s signatures. Dealing with aggregated signatures is even trickier, given our goal for consensus participants to verify them on low-compute and low-bandwidth devices
      Tune in to weekly developer calls to track progress and learn more

      @ReamLabs Ream and @zeamETH achieved devnet1 interop! New report of @qdrvm_io also achieving interop just now!
      The first Lean Consensus devnet that integrates post-quantum signature signing & verification.
      Next step: scale up # of validators and performance baseline for future devnets!

      The main efforts driven forward were related to writing specifications for post-quantum signature aggregation and optimizations to the corresponding networking layer, which are necessary to handle the much larger post-quantum signatures

      This is the repo where you can see their findings and you can also follow the progress closely on this community maintained website too: https://leanroadmap.org/

      Post-quantum signature aggregation is also being worked on leanMultisig

      Besides, please correct me if I am wrong, if you ever get worried about quantum, you transfer your funds to a fresh address and not transact with the new account until more guidance arrives. If no existing signature is known from an account, it will be safe.