Back in 2014, there was this bold vision floating around: what if you could build permissionless, decentralized applications that run everything—finance, social networks, ride sharing, organizational governance, crowdfunding—all powered by a new stack of technologies? It sounded ambitious, maybe even radical at the time. The idea was to create an entire alternative web, one where users owned their data and power wasn't concentrated in the hands of a few tech giants. That vision has evolved significantly, but the core principle still resonates: Web3 infrastructure continues pushing toward that decentralized future.