So said Erik Erikson, the psychologist who coined the term "identity crisis.” It often feels true: identity is a nebulous concept, with many connotations and its meaning highly context-dependent. This is no different in Web3.

At the start of this year, Twitter and Facebook banned then-President Donald Trump from their platforms. Google, Apple, and Amazon kicked Parler, a right-wing social media app, off their platforms. 2021 gave clear proof yet that tech companies control online society more than any government, constituency, or constitution. Elizabeth Warren has led a chorus calling for a breakup of big-tech, while the big tech companies themselves race to pour billions into the ‘metaverse’ to establish their dominance on the next major platform.

A central pillar of the Web3 vision is "composable data" - the idea that the information that powers our online experiences can be read, remixed, and 'composed on' by applications across the web. This reusable model is in contrast to today's model, where data are primarily trapped in application-specific siloes.