Marketplaces 3.0?

Crypto is ushering in a new era of marketplace design. Marketplace 1.0 (think Craigslist) solved mainly for discovery of supply and demand, monetizing through sponsored listings. Marketplace 2.0 (Ebay, Uber, Airbnb) went deeper and started controlling the transaction itself, becoming vertical since transactions differ so much by category — this is what we call web2 marketplaces today.

Their fundamental flaw is the take rate: the more a platform wants to earn, the more extractive it has to be toward supply and demand, which eventually pushes both sides to look for alternatives. That's spawned variants — 2.1 marketplaces with a zero take rate but other revenue sources like lending or data, and 2.2 marketplaces that build tools to help the supply side aggregate, like Shopify or Amazon roll-ups.

Crypto's incentive mechanisms have kicked off a new design: web3 marketplaces like Braintrust, where the 'central platform' operates not-for-profit, using tokens to bootstrap and run the ecosystem instead of a take rate. That makes bootstrapping cheaper and faster, and makes retaining network effects easier, since supply and demand hold real voting power on the platform. Tokens as a model still have real problems today, since it's early — but I'm bullish on the experiments and regulatory clarity still to come.