Web3 Foundation exists to advance a decentralized internet where people have meaningful control over their identity, data, and digital interactions. We believe people should be able to use the Internet without surrendering control to the services they depend on.
That means an Internet where people can decide who accesses their data and how it is used. Where they can move between services without leaving their identity, data, or digital relationships behind. Where information and value can move across open networks without requiring permission from a single intermediary. And where the systems we depend on can be inspected and verified rather than simply trusted. The principle behind all of this is simple.
The Internet should be built to benefit its users, with power distributed rather than concentrated in the hands of a few.
Much of today's Internet works differently.
Digital platforms often control the infrastructure, the user relationship, and the data created through participation in their ecosystems. Even where data can technically be exported, moving it somewhere useful, connecting it to another service, or taking your digital relationships with you can remain challenging.
As more of our identity, communication, work, money, and social lives move online, these questions matter more.As more of our identity, communication, work, money, and social lives move online, these questions matter more.
Who controls your identity?
Who decides how your data can be used?
Can you leave one service without starting again from zero?
Can a digital system keep functioning without depending on a single organization's decisions?
These are not only technical questions. They are also social, legal, political, and economic ones. But technology shapes what is possible.
The Web3 Foundation was created because some technologies can change the structure of digital systems themselves. Cryptography can allow people to prove things without revealing everything about themselves.
Open protocols let different services and applications interact without a single company coordinating them. Blockchains and other decentralized systems can distribute authority, provide common rules that participants can verify, and reduce dependence on individual intermediaries.
None of these technologies removes people, institutions, governance, or law from the equation. Nor does technology guarantee fair outcomes. What it can do is reduce the trust placed in any single actor and make important system properties harder to change unilaterally.
History shows the risks of concentrating too much power and decision-making in too few hands. Durable change therefore requires more than asking powerful institutions to behave differently. It also means building systems in which control can be distributed by design, and technology can help create those foundations.
The printing press did not guarantee that ideas would survive, but it radically changed who could reproduce and distribute them. Once the capability became widespread, it became harder to concentrate control over information circulation.
The technologies behind Web3 can play a similar role for digital agency: making capabilities available through infrastructure rather than leaving them entirely at an intermediary's discretion. That is the opportunity the Web3 Foundation lives to pursue.
Web3 Foundation was established in 2017 to support technologies and applications that advance a decentralized web, particularly through open protocols and modern cryptography. That mission led the Foundation to support the development of foundational technologies including Polkadot and Substrate.
The Foundation provided grants, supported research and ecosystem development, and helped establish the legal and regulatory groundwork needed for technologies including Polkadot and Kusama to develop and launch.
Through initiatives such as Web3 Summit, the Web3 Foundation also created a place for developers, researchers, and thinkers to explore the technologies and principles behind a decentralized web. These activities were different expressions of the same underlying purpose: helping turn Web3 principles into working technology.
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Digital systems should increase people's ability to make meaningful choices. Identity, data, assets and relationships should not be held hostage by a single service provider.
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Where possible, systems should let claims, rules, and outcomes be checked rather than merely accepted. Trust should be supported by transparent mechanisms, not demanded by authority alone.
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Privacy cannot be reduced to a setting, a policy promise, or an individual burden. It must be designed into the architecture of digital systems from the beginning.
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Healthy digital spaces need rules, moderation and protection from abuse. But safety should not become a permanent justification for opaque control, universal surveillance or the removal of choice.
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People should not need to understand protocols, keys, networks, or cryptography to benefit from better infrastructure. Technical sophistication is valuable only when it creates a simpler, more humane experience.
In 2026, Web3 Foundation returned its focus to that broader mission.
Polkadot has matured significantly since the Foundation began supporting its development, creating space for Web3 Foundation to focus more directly on the ideas and technologies that motivated its creation in the first place; importantly, the Foundation's mission is not defined by any single network. It is to advance the foundations of a decentralized web: open protocols, modern cryptography, meaningful user control over identity and data, interoperability between services, and systems that reduce unnecessary dependence on centralized intermediaries.
Polkadot remains an important expression of those principles. But the ambition is larger.
We want to help create an Internet where people have greater agency over their digital lives; where systems can be open, interoperable, and verifiable; and where participation does not require surrendering control to a single platform or institution.
Our role is to support the research, technologies, and people that can make that internet possible. That is the work ahead.
© 2026 Web3 Foundation. All rights reserved.