Gavin Wood, co-founder of , , and , believes that for Web3 technology to reach its true potential, cryptocurrency transactions should be fee-free.
Speaking to Cointelegraph at the Web3 Summit in Berlin, Wood shared his vision of making Web3 accessible to everyone, stating: “My greatest hope is that we can actually make [Web3] “Free for all.”
Wood's latest initiative, a tattoo-based Web3 individuality solution called “ink proof,” is part of his efforts to promote a free Web3 ecosystem globally.
Wood also revealed that he and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin initially considered removing the Ether (ETH) token from the Ethereum network. “Vitalik and I were talking about the possibility of basically getting rid of Ether, the currency. Something that now seems unthinkable,” Wood said.
However, the founders eventually decided to keep Ether as a means to prevent spam and raise funds for further development.
Wood argued that developers must work to separate Ether from the Ethereum network to bring billions of Web2 users into Web3.
“It will be difficult to decouple Ethereum from Ether in an effective way that makes it sufficiently responsive to the type of applications we will need to produce and deploy on Web3,” he noted.
Wood highlighted Polkadot’s JAM chain, which is moving toward making cryptocurrency transactions virtually free. He noted that a more permanent solution to eliminating fees could be to develop “Web3 individuality,” which could eliminate the need for transaction fees and anti-spam mechanisms.
Polkadot’s creator said in a recent interview with Bullish CEO Tom Farley that he believes there is a lack of desire to create projects with long-term value — those that will still be relevant and useful a decade from now. Instead, he sees many focusing on short-term gains, building quickly to sell, often to buyers who are simply passing it on, driven more by hype than substance.
Wood admits that this is just his theory, not backed by hard economic data, but he believes this mindset is polluting the market and driving huge investments into layer-1 blockchains that may not have a meaningful future.
Interestingly, Wood argued that Ethereum, and possibly even Bitcoin, cannot be exceptions to the rules governing which blockchains will survive. However, he believes that Bitcoin, as the first cryptocurrency and primarily a store of value, could be an outlier due to its unique position in the market.
