As Web3 evolves from disruptive buzzword to operational framework, its most profound potential lies not in speculative NFTs or volatile crypto markets but in redefining artistic sovereignty through infrastructure, where ownership, authorship, and community governance become programmable realities rather than aspirational metaphors, offering creators—especially those historically excluded—a paradigm shift from platform dependency to protocol authorship; the decentralised web, with its rallying cry of Read. Write. Own., enables artists to bypass extractive intermediaries through blockchain-verified contracts, NFT-based royalties, and portable identities, allowing figures like Latasha to monetise music on her terms, and curators like Sian Morson to advocate for intentional, values-driven patronage that transcends algorithmic trends, yet this utopian architecture remains precarious, as shown by recent platform backsliding on royalty enforcement, proving that tech alone cannot deliver equity unless designed by and for the cultural labourers it claims to serve, hence the emergence of creator-led models like Zora, Sound.xyz, or Latasha’s own In Process, which enshrine principles of interoperability, transparent compensation, open infrastructure, and democratic governance via DAOs and modular protocols, challenging artists to become not just users of tools but architects of systems, a transformation that foregrounds self-determination over visibility, and collective agency over tokenised trends, particularly critical for creators of colour whose identities have been historically fragmented across platforms and markets, making decentralised identity a mode of civic resistance as much as technical utility, because the real promise of Web3 is not just in owning tokens but in shaping the logic that distributes cultural value, and this requires not only smart code but cultural literacy, political will, and ethical imagination; only then can the decentralised web transcend market speculation and become a civic commons for creators, built with dignity at its core.
