Contradictory Complex Web3 — — Entanglement of Piracy and “Openness”
All contradictions stem from slow development.
Web3 based on blockchain computing may not be as good as imagined in terms of right confirmation and data protection. In recent foreign media reports, Moti Levy, CEO of DeviantArt, the world’s largest platform for displaying and sharing various art creations (with over 70 million registered users), said that when the Web3 revolution hits, DeviantArt is also making corresponding change. As the vanguard of the Web3 era, NFT is naturally the object of DeviantArt’s attention. At present, the platform has indexed over 400 million NFTs, of which over 330,000 NFTs have copyright issues.
As we all know, whether it is Web3 itself or the product of the Web3 era — NFT, they are all based on blockchain technology, and blockchain technology has the characteristics of decentralization, openness, independence, security, and anonymity. Because of these characteristics, they have more obvious advantages than traditional network technology in the direction of right confirmation and data protection, so NFT is also called non-fungible token, which means that its copyright and ownership are unique and certain. But why are NFTs and virtual currencies frequently stolen and pirated NFTs frequent in recent years?
Problematic Web3
The most impressive NFT infringement case for Levy occurred in 2021. A few weeks after the death of an artist who died of cancer, thieves violated her artwork and put it up for sale on an NFT marketplace. When this incident came out, it caused a lot of uproar in the community because the way he infringed was so simple: right-click to save, and finally republish it on another NFT market, which suddenly became “his work”. Even though the NFT belongs to Web3, the pirated version has not obtained KYC. This incident deeply touched me.
It was a turning point for DeviantArt and emblematic of what Levy described as a broader “explosion” of infringement. “A significant portion of the 12 million new NFTs that DeviantArt scans each week are stolen, and as time goes on, the huge problems that NFTs expose will become more apparent,” Levy said. Web3 promotes its monetization by making a huge commitment to the protection of creators’ interests, which is supported by multiple creators and copyright protection and platform transaction parties. In fact, because this is what DeviantArt has done for the past 20 years, except that Web3 serves this larger community. But with Web3’s co-created, open nature, some bad behavior is undermining Web3’s promise.
In addition to these problems mentioned by Levy, there is a “dark forest” hidden behind Web3. For example, on April Fool’s Day this year, Jay Chou blew himself up on his social account that his “boring ape” NFT was “fished” and emphasized that it was not an “April Fool’s Day joke”. Later, some media reported that Jay Chou was “fished” by not only one, but four NFTs, which are sold later by the fishermen. It is said that a total of 169.6 ETHs, or about 3.65 million yuan, were sold.
It is reported that in 2021 alone, there will be 231 blockchain security incidents in the Web3 field, with losses exceeding $9.8 billion, or about 62 billion yuan. In February 2022, the “phishing attack” alone caused the users of OpenSea to lose $1.7 million worth of NFTs. In the same month, the cross-chain bridge Wormhole was hacked, and the loss was as high as $320 million. A month later, the NFT game Axie Infinity’s sidechain network Ronin Network was hacked, losing $625 million worth of cryptocurrency.
Is the concept wrong or normal?
Regarding the current problem of Web3, Levy believes that this is a normal phenomenon, and said that any new thing is plagued by various problems in the early stage, and it needs to go through continuous development and continuous improvement in the developing process. See past experience.
He took DeviantArt as an example. In August 2021, DeviantArt launched a program called DeviantArt Protect (allowing anyone to use it to find out whether their own works have been infringed, whether they are registered members or not), through cooperation with NFT trading platforms such as OpenSea (Nine platforms in total), utilize their API to scan works on NFT marketplaces to protect creators’ work from theft.
Following the launch of the DeviantArt Protect program, Levy said it has significantly increased the trust of DeviantArt members in Web3. DeviantArt Protect creates a trust and security layer in Web3, a decentralized protocol that allows anyone to contribute, adding accountability to the problem of art theft. We’d like to see claims from other Web3 protocol partners and to see other markets say: ‘Hey, we found this infringement’, he added. DeviantArt Protect aims to root out bad actors and increase awareness of Web3 experiments trust and protect intellectual property in the process.
Of course, there are also some pessimists who think that the concept of Web3 itself has problems. Generally speaking, people call the “decentralized” Internet running on “blockchain” technology Web3, which means the next generation Internet. In this regard, the well-known Internet celebrity Musk (the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, the future boss of Twitter) also specially sent a video at the end of last year to complain about a wave of Web3 (video content: this reminds me of when I was in my twenties, explain to people what the internet is, and the same thing is happening with Web3), and followed up with an explanation on Twitter: I’m not suggesting that Web3 is real, at least for now, Web3 is more of a marketing term. Just curious what the future will look like 10, 20 or even 30 years from now. 2051 sounds like crazy futurism.
It is reported that this is not the first time that Musk has mocked Web3. He has previously tweeted a set of “urinal etiquette” cartoons with his founder to mock Web3 (the cartoon shows a man entering the men’s toilet and walking through several unused urinals, clinging to strangers, advertising his interest in digital currencies and Web3, etc.).
However, most people prefer the former, that is, the development of Web3 is still in the early stage, and all the current contradictions are due to the slow development. In the future, with the acceleration of Web3 technology and commercialization, the contradiction between piracy and “openness” will naturally be eliminated.
