In 2014, we envisioned a suite of technologies that would enable permissionless, decentralized applications supporting finance, social media, ride-sharing, government agencies, crowdfunding, and potentially even a complete alternative network. Ethereum: The blockchain. This world computer provides shared memory for any application. Whisper: The data layer. Handles messages at prohibitively high costs that the blockchain cannot afford, without requiring consensus. Swarm: The storage layer. Used for long-term file storage. Over the past five years, this core vision has sometimes been overshadowed by various "meta" concepts and "narratives," which at times dominated. But the core vision has never died. In fact, the core technologies underpinning this vision are constantly being strengthened. Ethereum now employs a proof-of-stake mechanism. Ethereum is scaling, cost-effective, and, thanks to the power of the Zero-Knowledge Proof Virtual Machine (ZK-EVM), it is moving towards greater scalability and lower costs. The vision of "sharding" is gradually being realized thanks to ZK-EVM + PeerDAS. And the L2 layer can further enhance this with various speed improvements. Whisper, now renamed Waku, powers numerous applications (such as two I frequently use). Even outside of Waku, the quality of decentralized messaging has improved. Fileverse (a decentralized alternative to Google Docs and Sheets) has seen significant improvements in usability over the past year. IPFS, as a decentralized file retrieval method, has demonstrated extremely high performance and stability, but IPFS itself doesn't solve the storage problem. Therefore, there is still room for improvement in this area. All the prerequisites for the Web3 vision are in place and will continue to improve in the coming years. Therefore, now is the time to build decentralized networks. Fileverse is an excellent example of the right approach: * It fully leverages the strengths of Ethereum and Gnosis Chain: name, account, and permission management. Document registration. * It uses decentralized messaging and file storage to store documents and propagate document changes. * The application has passed the "abandonment test": (Even if Fileverse disappears, you can still retrieve documents and even continue editing them using the open-source UI). This is what we mean by "building a hammer, a one-time purchase, a lifetime ownership, not a corporate garbage AI dishwasher that requires you to register a Google account, pay a monthly subscription fee for extra washing modes, and may even monitor you, stopping if you are politically persecuted abroad." If you think the criticism of corporate garbage is a bit exaggerated, then it turns out it's actually a combination of the following three points: * * * In 2014, decentralized applications were just toys, hundreds of times more difficult to use in the Web 2.0 era. By 2026, Fileverse is good enough that I can frequently use it to write documents and send them to others for collaboration. The resurgence of decentralization is coming.