Today, a handful of companies own the platforms we depend on. They set the rules. They extract the value. We just log in. Our data, networks, even cultural spaces all live on infrastructure we don’t own and can’t change.

The internet was meant to be open. Instead, it became enclosed.

A community-owned internet flips that. The people who use the platform also govern it. The value it creates flows back to the people who create it. The infrastructure, network, rules, and economics—all under community control.

That was web3’s original promise: replace gatekeepers with collective ownership. It’s just taken a decade for the technology to catch up to the vision.

General-Purpose L1s → Purpose-Built Networks

Ten years ago, Ethereum introduced the decentralized world computer. Anyone could launch open protocols for value, exchange, and coordination. New L1s followed. But all shared the same blockspace, rules, and one-size-fits-all economic model.

Five years ago, rollups scaled Ethereum: cheaper, faster, more flexible. But even rollups left the most important part out of the community’s hands: control over the network’s core logic and economics. Even today, communities are still not true owners.

Every day, new purpose-built chains launch—not because it’s easier, but because it’s better. Communities are choosing the harder path to build networks, infrastructure, and economic systems that truly serve them—systems shaped by their own needs, values, and cultures.

This is how the internet becomes community-owned—from the bottom up.

The Path to a Community-Owned Internet Starts with the Sequencer

L1s and rollups are drifting out of alignment with the communities they claim to serve. The reason is simple: ownership and control sits somewhere else.

To make the internet community-owned, communities must first own their networks. And to own a network, they must control its heart: the sequencer.

The sequencer is the network’s core operating system—it determines how transactions are processed, how fees are collected, and how value is shared. As long as someone else controls it, the community is just a tenant on its own network.

True community ownership starts with the sequencer. When a community owns its sequencer, it owns the rules, the economics, and the power to evolve its network on its own terms.

After years working with hundreds of DAOs, onchain communities, and purpose-built networks, we’ve learned that community-owned sequencers are the missing piece to scaling web3.

That’s what we’ve built and are launching in the coming weeks.

The Journey Starts Tomorrow

For the first time, we have the components to make a community-owned internet real: infrastructure to spin up purpose-built chains in minutes—and soon infrastructure to enable true community ownership at the sequencer and network level.

The technology is ready. Now it’s about how boldly communities will use it.

Tomorrow marks the start of Syndicate’s endgame—where the real building of the internet we were promised finally begins. Together.

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Syndicate's Endgame: Building a Truly Community-Owned Internet