W4-002 · Across all four conditions
The missing condition
The missing condition is the specific one of the four whose absence explains a failure — the diagnostic claim that most Web 3 categories collapsed structurally rather than for want of execution or demand.
They did not fail because the idea was wrong. They failed because one of four legs was missing.
Post-mortems of the last cycle almost always reach for narrative: hype, tourists, bad actors, a market that turned. All true, and none of it explains why some products with identical hype survived and others did not.
The missing-condition diagnosis is more specific and more useful. GameFi had worlds, players and a unit — and no redemption. SocialFi had a graph and a token — and no portable identity. Metaverse property had scarcity and speculation — and no economy inside the world. In each case the technology worked. The structure was incomplete.
This is a falsifiable claim, which is the point. It predicts that a product supplying all four survives conditions that kill products supplying three, and it can be checked against any case in the archive.