Have you lately found yourself wondering, “What is Web3?” Well, you are not alone. Whether you measure it based on venture capital (VC) funding, lobbying campaigns, or corporate announcements, the idea is gaining traction. Put simply, Web3 — also known as Web 3.0 — is the next evolution of the internet and, perhaps, of organizing society.
Web3 largely relies on decentralized ledger technologies (DLTs) such as Blockchains to disrupt the current centralized intermediaries, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi), and cryptocurrencies are some of the first Web3 applications that have gained traction in recent times.
To believers, Web3 will revolutionize the internet, making it smarter and our lives easier. Dive in to learn more about web3 and why it is a new paradigm in web interaction in this post.
A Brief History of the Internet
We will begin by looking at the evolution of the internet to help us understand paradigm-shifting changes introduced by Web3. This journey dates back to March 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee — a British computer scientist — proposed the current World Wide Web (WWW). We can summarize these evolutions into three eras: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0.
Web 1.0 (Read-Only Web)
Web 1.0 — also called the read-only web — was the first implementation of the internet, lasting from 1989 to 2005. The core technologies that underpinned Web 1.0 included hypertext mark-up language (HTML), cascading style sheets (CSS), hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), and universal resource identifier (URI).
In those days, the web was where people sought and found information. Web 1.0 can best be described as a read-only web because it was not interactive, and users were largely content consumers. By 1999, the number of websites reached 3 million.
Because of the massive volumes of online information, many web browsers such as Mosaic, Opera, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer emerged. It was also during this time that search engines such as Google and Yahoo were unveiled.
Web 1.0 had two significant limitations. First, websites could only be understood by humans, i.e., they did not have machine-compatible content. Second, updating users and managing content could only be undertaken by a webmaster.
Web 2.0 (Read-Write Web)
Web 2.0 — also called read-write web — is the second and current internet iteration that started in 2005. With Web 2.0, users are not only content consumers but also producers. Instead of merely reading the website, users can contribute to the site’s content by commenting on published articles. Users can also create their own accounts or profiles on websites, allowing them to participate as content creators.
Web 2.0 encourages users to rely on web browsers that serve as an interface to back-end file storage facilities. The core technologies that underpin Web 2.0 applications include:
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- js
- Python
- Java
- Go
Take Twitter — a micro-blogging platform that lets users publish their own messages and interact with other people — for example. As a Web 2.0 application, Twitter must have an updated database to store essential data such as user accounts, posts, comments, tags, likes, etc.
There must also be a back-end code (written in Node.js, Java, or Python) that defines the platform’s business logic. For example, what happens when a new user signs up to the platform, tweets, or comments on someone else’s tweets?
Twitter also requires a front-end code (typically written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) to define the platform’s user interface (UI) logic. For example, how does the site look, and what happens when a user likes someone else’s tweets?
The diagram below summarizes Web 2.0 architecture:
Figure 1: Web 2.0 architecture
When you tweet, you interact with Twitter’s front-end application, which communicates to its back-end, which in turn communicates to a centralized database. All the code gets hosted on centralized servers and is transmitted to users via a browser.
Web 2.0 has radically reduced the cost and latency at which businesses and people exchange information and work with geographically dispersed communities they do not necessarily know through trusted intermediaries. As the reach of counterparties expanded, so did the number of global enterprises.
At its heart, today’s Web 2.0 landscape is heavily centralized, allowing global coordination of information exchange via a set of trusted third parties. These intermediaries provide a digital social trust layer where strangers can interact: from Facebook to Amazon to Uber. Unfortunately, we have become overly dependent on these platforms for our day-to-day activities, where the business model for most Web 2.0 platforms largely relies on users’ data.
Because they are heavily centralized, Web 2.0 providers exclusively own user data and can offer advertising services or sell it without the owners’ consent. Businesses and individuals can also suffer via higher fees or platform risks because Web 2.0 providers can arbitrarily change rules.
Web 3.0
Unlike Web 2.0 applications that are heavily centralized, Web 3.0 eliminates trusted intermediaries. There is no centralized database or entity to store the application state or the back-end logic. With Web 3.0, businesses, people, and even machines can exchange value and information and work with global counterparties in a trustless ecosystem.
The most significant evolution enabled by Web 3.0 is the elimination of trusted third parties on a global scale. It achieves this through Blockchain and other DLTs that allow businesses and individuals to use decentralized applications (DApps). These applications, in turn, run on a decentralized state machine maintained by anonymous nodes on the internet.
Here is how a Web 3.0 architecture looks like:
Figure 2: Web 3.0 architecture
A Web 3.0 environment has the following components:
- Blockchain. As an open and decentralized network, the ledger is globally accessible and has a deterministic state machine that nodes maintain through consensus protocols in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner. Anyone can access and write to the ledger because no single entity owns the network.
- Smart contracts. These are codes that execute on the decentralized virtual machine (DVM) and define the business logic behind the state changes on the Blockchain. Because smart contracts reside on the Blockchain, anyone on the network can audit its logic.
- Decentralized virtual machine. The DVM runs the logic expressed in the smart contracts and processes the state changes on the ledger.
- Decentralized application. The DApp defines the UI logic and allows users to interact with the application logic expressed in the smart contracts.
What Are the Main Properties of Web3?
Decentralization is the core philosophy behind all Web3 applications. However, besides decentralization, Web3 applications have the following three main properties:
- It is largely a semantic web. The phrase “semantic web” refers to the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C)’s new internet vision that allows machines to read and interpret web data. Semantic web technologies enable users to create data stores on the internet, generate vocabularies, and write rules that handle data via technologies such as resource description framework (RDF) and web ontology language (OWL).
- It is primarily driven by artificial intelligence (AI). AI is increasingly being used to make more intelligent machines that satisfy user needs. AI alongside semantic web will enable Web3 applications to filter and present users with the best data possible.
- It is essentially a three-dimensional (3D) cyberworld. Web3 will change the future of the internet from simple 2D applications into more realistic 3D cyberspaces. The 3D design, enabled by extended reality (XR) technologies, will place users inside the internet rather than just interacting with it.
How Analog Plans to Position Itself in Web3 Environment
The forthcoming wave of Web3 applications will go far beyond just the initial use case of cryptocurrencies, DeFi, and NFTs. Through the abundance of interactions and global scale of parties, Web3 applications will cryptographically connect data from businesses, individuals, and even machines with efficient machine learning (ML) algorithms.
This will give rise to fundamentally new marketplaces with different business models. At Analog, we have carefully assessed the pain points users are currently facing in the Web3 marketplace. At its heart, the Analog network has three compelling goals:
- It creates a universal, verifiable time data
It is roughly 12 years since Satoshi Nakamoto unveiled proof-of-work (PoW) as an underlying consensus protocol for ensuring the validity of any ledger state. However, despite the novelty of PoW and other emerging protocols such as the proof-of-stake (PoS), no decentralized consensus algorithm solves the problem of the verifiability of time data.
The Analog’s proof-of-time (PoT) is a revolutionary decentralized consensus protocol that creates a universal, validated time data marketplace. Unlike current DApps that have weak assumptions about time data, the Analog’s PoT is set to power the next-generation time-dependent DApps such as timed auction sales, timed advertisements, and timed rides, among others.
2. It is a layer-0, Omni-chain protocol
The current Web3 landscape mirrors the same challenges that Web 2.0 applications have, i.e., siloing and mismanagement of data privacies. These challenges are largely due to the lack of an interoperability framework to connect disparate Blockchains.
Our primary goal is to unveil a layer-0 multi-chain protocol that facilitates cross-chain interoperability. We believe such a protocol will allow developers to build time-dependent DApps that can easily trigger the transfer tokens, transmit time data, and initiate calls across multiple chains.
3. It is a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP)-based protocol
Safeguarding privacy is a major problem facing current permissionless Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Yet, disclosing secrets appears unavoidable. The Analog network utilizes the zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARKs) to safeguard data privacies.
zk-SNARKs are non-interactive ZKPs that the network uses to transfer time data between applications without compromising the time data itself. The zk-SNARKs protocol ensures that private information remains hidden from the public view on the Analog ledger.
Visit https://www.analog.one/ to learn more about the Analog network and how you can take advantage of Web3 applications.
Learn more about the Analog network from the links below:
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalogToken/
Medium: https://medium.com/@analogtime
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/analogpost
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/analogone
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/analogoneofficial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OneAnalog
You can also join the chat and learn more about the Analog network from the following community channels:
Telegram: https://t.me/analogtimer
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Discord: https://discord.gg/jacDmeyQge
