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Decentraland: The Alleged Decentralization of Blockchain Applications

By Massimo Franceschet
Communications of the ACM, June 2023, Vol. 66 No. 6, Pages 45-47
10.1145/3563942
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metal blocks on a stylized 3D landscape, illustration — Credit: Yurchanka Siarhei

Inspired by a post by Moxie Marlinspike on the subject of Web3,⁵ I wish to elaborate on the promise of decentralization of blockchain applications. I will focus on two major use cases of blockchain technology, namely finance and art, which beg the questions: What does decentralization mean? Are blockchain finance and art truly decentralized? And if not, what are the forces that drive us toward centralization?

A Web3 marketplace is fundamentally different from a centralized Web2 application.

I am aware of the issue of centralization of existing blockchains. However, this topic is abundantly covered in the previous literature (a comprehensive entry point is Sai⁶). What is missing, or at least less approached, is a discussion on the level of effective decentralization of blockchain applications, in particular of finance and art. Therefore, I focus this Viewpoint on these applications.

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