The Theory of Web 3.0

Published in

Ankr

8 min readNov 18, 2021

What it is, why it’s so exciting, and some other hot takes. An inside perspective from a couple of guys working at a Web 3.0 company.

It’s been another surreal year with the public scratching their heads over a mess of strange events. Zuck rebranded his company as Meta, Bitcoin became legal tender in El Salvador, and somehow thanks to a JPEG cartoon ape, your cousin Johnny is now a millionaire that gets to hang out with Steph Curry? Trust me, it’s all connected.

Amidst the craziness, Web 3.0 has been one of the biggest buzzwords of the year, and there are a lot of different ideas about what it is and what it entails. In the simplest of terms, it’s exactly what it sounds like — the third generation of the internet. However, we haven’t exactly broken down iterations of the internet as neatly as telecom companies and their cell networks (think 3G, 4G, 5G). But whereas the move to 5G primarily signifies improvements in things like data speeds, the implications of Web 3.0 are technical as well as… philosophical.

Those who work in technology are notoriously bad at describing the importance of what they are working on. And we get confused when the public isn’t as excited as we are about decentralized autonomous organizations and smart contracts. So let’s break the norm and attempt to make the term Web 3.0 as clear as possible.

First, What’s Web 1 & 2?

If you’re old enough, but not that old, you may remember the first versions of the internet you interacted with after 30 seconds of dial-up noises. You could visit websites and send messages, and, unless you were a programmer, that was about it. Using the internet in Web 1 meant only consuming information on the “read-only” web. There was a lack of interactivity and some glaring UX problems, which led to some questioning its use-cases. But soon, some small up-and-comers like Google and Yahoo would make the web much easier to use and navigate.

The tech evolved to the next phase: Web 2. In the early 2000s, platforms like YouTube, Myspace, and The Facebook emerged, allowing us to do something very novel and exciting — populate pages of the internet with our content and even create the cultural phenomenon of the “meme.” The problem was that the more we fell in love with Web 2 sites, social media, online shopping, and user-generated content, the more power and influence we gave to our favorite platforms. And if you don’t die a hero, like the millennial’s beloved Myspace, you live long enough to become a villain (for all The Dark Knight fans out there).

Issues With The Web of the Past

When the era of Web 2 came into its own, we started looking less and less like users or customers and more like the product itself. The economics of the web heavily favored two types of business models — subscriptions and digital advertising. The effectiveness of both relies heavily on user data. The data points for everything you’ve ever searched, read, watched, posted, liked, clicked on, opted into, interacted with, purchased, or even thought about have been scooped up into a massive digital dragnet and sold to the highest bidder.

Companies use your data to customize your entire web experience, and, to an extent, your life experience. What you see on your news feed, the mail you receive, the opportunities you get… Our entire realities are increasingly shaped by our digital footprints. That’s a bit of a problem, considering we have such little say in the matter. Our privacy concerns aside, we’ve been robbed of something very, very valuable. So what happens when enough of us realize we could use a cut of the $100 billion industry companies built with our stolen data (especially since there’s only 8 billion of us)? Web 3.0 happens.

What Exactly Is Web 3.0?

TL;DR: It’s crypto, it’s the Metaverse, it’s rebellion, it’s a movement for a more open, free, ethical, equitable, user-owned-and-operated internet.

A Product of Its Predecessors

Web 3.0 is the reactive solution to significant challenges in previous versions of the internet, which have resulted in massive problems in the current state of the world. The premise of Web 3.0 is to give us back our agency, our data, and our power. But how?

New technologies like blockchain and crypto give us a way to decentralize the internet services and infrastructure we rely on. For instance, decentralized Web 3.0 applications (dApps) depend on blockchain networks made up of thousands of nodes (the computers that run and store blockchains) spread worldwide to operate.

Since blockchains rely on a global network of computing power instead of a centralized company data center, it is nearly impossible for governments or companies to take them down. That means more privacy and censorship resistance for users with no abuse of their data.

Decentralization also spreads the financial rewards of business more fairly to everyone involved with a place for all to contribute a node, stake crypto to nodes to support them, create content to earn rewards, and so much more in the new economic systems of Web 3.0. And instead of having a login for every app, users will have an independent crypto wallet like MetaMask or Clover Wallet that acts as their passport to Web 3.0.

A Whole Lot of Tech Wrapped Into One

Along with its moral implications, Web 3.0 is categorized by its impressive technology stack comprised of the hotly anticipated “under construction” applications of the past decade that are finally ready for release. The term Web 3.0 has been used for packaging these breakthroughs in a more palatable way by wrapping them up into one nice burrito.

The Metaverse & Virtual Reality — The Metaverse is the virtual world that will encompass many of the applications of Web 3.0. As much as Zuck doesn’t want you to know, the Metaverse is not his brainchild. Instead, it’s an aggregate of all the virtual reality platforms creating a more interactive and gamified 3D experience for internet users. Whether you approve or reject more immersion, the alternative universe is coming, so get ready for it. Says who? Nike, Disney, Gucci, Nvidia, Tencent, Microsoft — in short, the money. If they’re going all-in to assert their dominance and corner new markets, you can be sure it will be a thing.
Artificial Intelligence — AI has been on everyone’s radar for a long time. So long, in fact, that we’ve nearly forgotten about it. But now, AI satisfies many of our initial hopes. It can see, hear, move, understand, drive cars, and read your mind. Thanks to the powers of AI, Web 3.0 will be semantic (machine-readable). That means Tim Berners Lee’s long-reaching vision for the web will finally come true: “Day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy, and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines.” AI will enable the web to become more intelligent and better at establishing meaningful connections between different data, so our systems can make better decisions for us.
Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, & Decentralized Finance — The principles of Web 3.0 and blockchain go hand-in-hand. Bitcoin is most often thought of as the original blockchain use-case as both a store of value and a peer-to-peer payment system. After ten years, cryptocurrency has exploded in popularity, giving way to new use-cases constantly. Perhaps one of the most compelling use-cases so far is decentralized finance (DeFi) that allows crypto users to contribute their digital assets to secure the infrastructure of blockchain systems and earn yields for their efforts. Similarly, smart contract capabilities within crypto solve an age-old conundrum of providing “trustless” transactions without the need for intermediaries like banks or governments.
The Internet of Things — Our cars have computers, our phones are computers, our clothing, vacuums, dogs, speakers, cameras, and just about everything else will have a computer or at least connectivity attached to it. The web is expanding to accommodate whole new sets of devices that will interact with the mesh of other connected items. Everything communicating its information to everything else in the IoT means nearly limitless possibilities for things like smart cities.
And More — There are probably dozens of other technologies that fall under the loose allegiance of Web 3.0. And there will be many new technologies and industries that we won’t even see coming.

A Decentralized & Interoperable Web

Source: Twitter

The internet you are using right now operates like magic. You search Google and get what you were looking for within a 0.2-second window. In that split second, there are a lot of processes occurring and a lot of money changing hands.

Your query to the search engine on your device bounces around to a lot of different places before getting back to you with an answer:

Your modem & Internet Service Provider
Domain Name Servers
Data centers
Internet Hosting Services
Finally, back to load the HTML code so you can view a page

The steps in this process are all owned by centralized companies. Not to mention that when your page loads, it most likely belongs to a centralized company, meaning everyone is profiting except for the user. In contrast, Web 3.0 allows us to operate much of this process with blockchain technology and protocols to replace these centralized systems.

Who owns Bitcoin or Ethereum? No one — and everyone. We can build web browsers, operating systems, storage platforms, payments systems, and so much more now just using decentralized, open-source software. In short, Web 3.0 can begin to replace centralized services with decentralized applications that don’t treat people like products.

A Big Opportunity For Our Generations Brightest Minds

“Imagine all the good the tech industry and venture capital could do if they just had different shared visions of what the future looked like.” — David Karpf in Wired magazine, Nov. 2021

To an outsider, Web 3.0 and its connected technologies could all look like another waste of resources that could be better put to use elsewhere. But what they don’t understand is that Web 3.0 has the potential to balance the scales of the global economy and give more power back to the people. It has all the technology available to solve some of the world’s biggest underlying problems. All we need is the right minds to join the cause and connect the dots.

In many ways, Web 3.0 is a fresh slate, a new opportunity, a second chance — if you’re a doomer, perhaps our last chance to get things right. Whatever the case, it’s going to move fast. So buckle up, and good luck!

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