What happened to our decentralized private new internet?

The article, co-authored by Peyman Momeni (Fairblock), Amit Chaudhary (Labyrinth) and Muhammad Yusuf (Delphi Digital), argues that Web3 has so far failed to deliver practical private applications, and that balancing onchain confidentiality with compliance requires decentralized selective disclosure. It says blockchain utility after 16 years is mostly limited to meme coins and infrastructure projects, and that businesses cannot yet share payroll or confidential data onchain. It proposes threshold-network designs in which Revokers flag transactions and Guardians vote on de-anonymization requests, with each request publicly verifiable. The authors say existing approaches such as sanction lists, KYC and Chainalysis-style tools are each incomplete on their own.