The Information, April 29th, 2022, Zoe Bernard
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.
White is no dilettante when it comes to cataloging and archiving information online, either. She has been editing Wikipedia articles since childhood; at 13, she began tinkering with entries on her favorite emo bands, Evanescence and Disturbed. By the age of 17, she was an aficionada within the Wikipedia community, dedicating hours a day to maintaining error-riddled pages and attempting, unsuccessfully, to convince her mom to let her attend a Wikipedia conference in Israel.
The Wikipedia work satisfied what she called “a weird nerdy impulse” to validate information on the internet. Since December of last year, she’s turned her focus entirely to the tsunami of scams, hacks and “rug pulls” of Web3, the notional new internet tied to blockchain technology. In a few short months since its debut, White’s Web3 Is Going Just Great Twitter account (its avatar is a Bored Ape NFT crying beside a globe emoji engulfed in flames) has garnered nearly 60,000 followers, and the website has received around a million page views.
In turn, she’s become known as the unofficial Web3 ombudsperson, documenting the sector’s myriad shortcomings and regularly appearing in blockchain-related news and on tech Substacks and podcasts. “She is the absolute nightmare of the DAO and Web3 zealous,” said Ed Zitron, writer and founder of media relations company EZPR, who worked with White on a piece critiquing a New York Times article on cryptocurrencies. “Molly is very clearly sufficient in her positions and is very well read, which Web3 people hate because they hate reading facts.”
White first became interested in Web3 in the late summer of 2021, when the buzzword overtook Twitter seemingly overnight. “People hear it and they’re like, ‘Oh! I don’t want to be left behind in Web 2.0. I need to figure out what this Web3 thing is,’” she said over a Zoom call from her home outside Boston. “On the surface level [it appears] harmless,” she said. “It’s all JPEGs and funny memes and people with too much money. But it’s very quickly becoming something that is normalized as a form of investment, the same as if someone went to a casino in Vegas and was like, ‘I’m gonna go invest my money [on the poker table].’”
White has long had a thing for toxic, fringe corners of the internet. In 2018, she began focusing her Wikipedia work on writing, researching and editing entries on right-wing online media sites like Gab and Parler, as well as the entries on incels and conspiracy theorist Jacob Wohl. Editing such entries felt important to White, not just because of her leftist politics (she describes herself as skewing socialist), but because of her firm belief that “one of the ways to make society change is through the spread of information,” she said.
“Molly is doing this because she is pissed off with bullshit,” said David Gerard, a Wikipedia editor who also writes critically about Web3 on a blog called “Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain.” “It’s good to have someone who has set themselves the task of tracking the tawdry grifts that make up this space because it is absolutely an area stitched together from tawdry grifts.” (The Web3 Is Going Just Great site includes a “grift counter” tabulating the total amounts stolen by crypto scammers.)
Currently, White spends hours a day working on Web3 Is Going Just Great from home, where she lives with her dog and two cats. While she has previously accepted donations for the exact amount of $117.97 to cover her server costs, she receives no compensation for her work on the blog because she feels it would be unethical. Also, she has a thing for nerdy passion projects. She once became fascinated by court reporting and helped the founder of an open-source, open-hardware tool for court stenographers upload his project to Github. She has tinkered with making robotic toys for foster kittens, with the goal of entertaining them remotely while she worked from HubSpot’s offices. (For several months, White rigged an oversize office monitor to display a live webcam of the kittens playing so she could observe them while at work.)
“I definitely am not trying to be the face of the crypto skeptics,” she said. Although she is becoming accustomed to being a more public-facing figure. Recently, she had a “weird, ‘stars in the eyes moment’” when she saw her work referenced by distinguished computer scientist David S.H. Rosenthal in a lecture at Stanford University.
But with notoriety has come increased pushback and even threats, especially in male-dominated forums online. Unfortunately, this is nothing new: When she was still a teenager, she was doxxed after Wikipedia featured a photo of her alongside her work as an editor on the site, prompting a horde of internet trolls to post the names of her family members alongside images of her face photoshopped onto the bodies of porn actresses, and uploaded them on 4chan. Years later, an aggrieved startup founder threatened her with a lawsuit and contacted her employer after White revised his Wikipedia page, which had been edited to read suspiciously like a personal advertisement. (While the lawsuit never materialized, White asked that the startup founder not be named because she doesn’t wish to be publicly associated with him.)
Now, White receives a constant stream of vitriol for her work on Web3 Is Going Just Great. Pro-Web3 users have called her “the Taliban,” “neo-Nazi” and “vermin”; more thoughtful critics take issue with the fact that White isn’t impartial in her coverage of Web3. “She’s looking for excuses to hate on the Web3 ecosystem,” said Greg Isenberg, who runs a Web3 blog called “Late Checkout” and a consulting company by the same name that he describes as “the McKinsey of Web3.” “Some of her articles are great and it’s great that people [like Molly] are poking holes, but I think that she should be reading the Chris Dixons of the world and my blog.”
White responded that she has read some of Isenberg’s work, which “raised a lot more questions than it answered.” While she has also “read a good chunk” of material by Dixon, who leads Web3 investing at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, she has lately “missed some of his musings” because he blocked her on Twitter shortly after she began her Web3 project, she said. (Dixon did not respond to a request for comment.)
Lately, White has become especially skeptical of the way venture capitalists have embraced Web3 and cryptocurrency projects, making “claims about how crypto will democratize wealth,” she said. “I think it’s pretty unlikely that the VC firms are putting their money into this stuff that is supposedly also going to loosen their grip on the web.”
She’s also criticized the mainstream media’s recent warming to cryptocurrencies. After New York Times reporter Kevin Roose wrote a lengthy, largely positive piece titled “The Latecomer’s Guide To Cryptocurrency,” White brought together a group of cryptocurrency skeptics to extensively annotate the story, which she described as “grossly irresponsible” and “a thinly veiled advertisement” for cryptocurrencies. “[Roose] dove into this very positive piece about crypto that waved off the arguments. He’d be like, ‘Well, some technologists think this whole thing can’t possibly work!’ But that’s as far as he would go into [it],” she said.
On her website, White neatly dismantles some of the leading pro-blockchain arguments, including the notion that blockchain technology, at a decade old, should be forgiven any youthful mistakes. In an essay titled “It’s Not Still the Early Days,” White compares the advancements made in electric vehicle technology and the continued sophistication of smartphones to the lack of progress in blockchain technology. She makes the case that Web3’s key infrastructure is a relative dinosaur in tech years, and that it’s innovating at the same sluggish pace as a tar drip.
“It’s impossible to pull apart any of her arguments because she isn’t being a firebrand about it,” said Zitron, the EZPR founder. “She is thoughtful and she takes an intellectual perspective. Journalism writ large needs someone exactly like Molly.”
