Over the course of one week in April, Molly White’s internet crime blotter Web3 Is Going Just Great documented 15 crypto-related offenses, each of which alone would hobble—or at least humiliate—most other industries. The malfeasance included a $182 million hack on the decentralized finance project Beanstalk; a $650,000 phishing attack targeting users of cryptocurrency wallet MetaMask; revelations that crypto exchange Binance handed the Kremlin information about users who donated to an anti-Putin politician; the rollout of a Binance-branded emoji that closely resembled a swastika; and the news that the previously anonymous founder of Gem, a non-fungible token startup, faced multiple accusations of rape.
And this was just one week. There was more mayhem to come in the week after that, as there was the week before, and the week before that…
White is in a unique position to catalog Web3’s never-ending highlight reel of disasters. A software engineer who has worked in front-end development at enterprise software company HubSpot for the past six years, the 28-year-old has a sophisticated understanding of the blockchain’s underlying technology. And as a Wikipedia editor who served six years on the site’s Arbitration Committee (the Wikipedian high court responsible for editing disputes), White has experience managing the internet’s decentralized hive mind.