The Myth of Decentralization

By Amir Soleymani • October 15, 2025 • 5 min read

Decentralization is the word that sold an entire industry. No middlemen, no gatekeepers, no one who can tell you what you may own or sell. It is a beautiful idea. It is also, for now, mostly an idea.

The ledger is decentralized. The pipes are not.

The blockchain itself — the public record of who holds what — is genuinely decentralized and hard to censor. The problem is everything you use to reach it. The marketplaces, the wallets, and the infrastructure that connect ordinary people to the chain are run by a handful of companies. While the blockchain may be decentralized, the way we interact with it is not.

OpenSea, the largest marketplace, can ban users, hide collections, and restrict transactions — the very censorship blockchain was supposed to make impossible. Wallet and infrastructure providers like MetaMask and Infura have blocked users in entire countries, from Venezuela to others under sanctions, in response to regulatory pressure. The chain stayed open. The doors to it did not.

New gatekeepers, same as the old ones

The art world was promised a future without gatekeepers. Instead, NFTs simply produced new ones. Curated platforms decide whose work is seen. A handful of influential voices shape what the market believes is valuable. And anonymity, which the space often treats as a virtue, quietly removes accountability: when decision-makers cannot be named, trust becomes very hard to build.

Smaller projects — the ones bootstrapped by individuals or tiny teams — often struggle to be recognized at all in this so-called decentralized space. That is not the level playing field we were promised.

An ideal worth being honest about

I am not saying decentralization is a lie. I am saying it is a work in progress that the marketing has run far ahead of. A permissionless Web3 is an ideal, not yet a reality — and pretending otherwise only sets people up to be surprised when a company they never think about decides what they can and cannot do. The honest path is to name the gatekeepers we still have, and then do the slow work of depending on them less.

This essay draws on my books The Art of Connectivity (2023) and Fools and JPEGs.