On Web3 and magic internet money

Editor's Note: The blockchain is a tough thing to explain. From Bitcoin to Axie Infinity, to online scams that the general public may not understand fully, there's a chasm between signal to noise and Tin Erispe does her best to explain what Web3 and the blockchain is, and why it matters.

- By TIN ERISPE

The Philippine blockchain scene didn't start with whitepapers or funding rounds. It started with a frenzy of coin offerings, stories of people buying their dream house with mid-tier gaming skills, and a few JPEGs of apes. Lots of apes.

Which is funny, when you think about it. Because blockchain is probably the least intuitive technology we've ever adopted en masse.

Gaming? Makes sense. Press buttons, get points. Win something, lose something. You see the feedback loop immediately. It's fun.

AI? Also easy to grasp. You type, it replies. Use it for writing, for drawing, for sounding smarter in email. It's useful.

But blockchain? You sign something, and then...nothing visibly happens that you can't already do with a regular app. If you're more informed, you know that something is happening somewhere on a network you can't see, verified by people you'll never meet. It's confusing.

And yet, here we are, one of the countries with the highest crypto adoption rates in the world.

Somewhere between sob stories of students who became Axie Infinity millionaires and the last Discord community financial scams, groups began to form. Not necessarily groups who understood the underlying tech, but ones who used it anyway.

The story of blockchain in the Philippines is not linear. It's messy and loud. It's equal parts magic internet money, 100x profit screenshots, and a bunch of developers deploying NFTs and tokens using the same templated code over and over again. It was (and still is) an echo chamber that no one can ever pierce. As they say, "We're All Gonna Make It." Or WAGMI: The cry of belief but also of desperation.