From App to dApp: How Web3 is Reshaping the Internet

Redistributing centralized powers, reimagining social structures, and innovating app architectures

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Cardstack

4 min readApr 19, 2022

As Web3 and its features become more mainstream, it’s important to ask one big question: How is Web3 reshaping the Internet?

While this question may seem simple on the surface, it often produces different answers from different people. Hundreds of tech writers, Twitter pundits, CEOs, marketers, technologists, and more have dealt with this topic, and many have produced great responses. But the sheer volume of discussion often obscures clear answers.

To begin understanding the significance of Web3, it’s helpful to know a bit about Web1 and Web2. Take a look at this Twitter thread from Web3 figurehead cdixon.eth, which provides an effective but succinct summary of the Internet’s history. Consider the move from Web1 to Web2 in general as a shift from openness to closedness. After its birth in the 90s, the web experienced the emergence of centralized tech giants and became the platformed digital world we know today. Above all, Web3 seeks to remedy this centralization by placing ownership into the hands of users, builders, community members, and more through the use of digital currencies, trustless transactions, and open-source software. Web3 is a liberating force set to dismantle power structures that have grown stale and too encompassing. In short, Web3 is a revolution.

Below, we’ve outlined three primary ways in which Web3 is already changing the Internet.

Web3 replaces centralized powers with decentralized networks.

The biggest, most obvious promise of Web3 is that it will begin deconstructing the centralized powers of Web2 tech companies by using decentralized protocols and software. Don’t worry if you’re scratching your head in confusion — we’ll break this down.

Consider Spotify. It’s come to light in recent years that the music streaming platform pays artists something “between $0.001 and $0.008” per stream, approximately $2000 per 1,000,000 streams. Many artists have voiced disapproval over Spotify’s centralized compensation process, from Taylor Swift to Thom Yorke, and some have even pulled their music from the platform. Web2, overall, is defined by this platformed mode of commerce and digital interaction where one central entity holds most of the power.

So, how does Web3 undo such power structures? Let’s take a look at OPUS, a blockchain-based music sharing platform. OPUS remedies the centralization of Web2 by basing its music player on the Ethereum blockchain and storing files on the peer-to-peer network IPFS. This system not only bypasses the need for a centralized server but also keeps storage costs drastically low. In other words, OPUS offers a compensation model where more revenue goes directly to the artists rather than to the streaming platform. This shows that Web3 is already changing the Internet by deconstructing centralization and installing more discursive models of interaction in its place.

Web3 restores autonomy to digital users.

As centralization became more and more popular throughout the 2010s, the digital users within the platforms became less and less autonomous. Most Web2 users were locked in with the constraints, conventions, rules, and regulations of each siloed platform. In other words, cross-platform interaction could not be achieved — the user was essentially at the mercy of the centralized platform.

Web3 fixes this issue by reorganizing digital interactions into networks that can govern themselves, often in the form of what’s called a DAO (digital autonomous organization).

So, what’s a DAO? Web3 aficionado Cooper Turley nailed it in an interview with CNBC: “a DAO is an internet community with a shared bank account.” In other words, DAOs are social organizations where power is not centralized in one entity or a singular board of directors but spread equally throughout the entire community. This discursive way of organizing digital society is already spreading throughout the blockchain world, moving from DAOs into fully decentralized social network platforms (collectively called DeSo) like Sapien. In DeSo, community members govern themselves rather than living under the thumbs of Big Tech.

Web3 allows us to rethink application architecture.

On a more tech-oriented level, Web3 alters traditional ways of building apps, websites, and more. In Web2, an application is built with three primary structures:

Frontend: what users interact with and see — UX displays, app interfaces, etc.
Backend: the technical backbone of the app that the user does not see but relies upon — the control center of the app
Database: a section of the app to securely contain and store the data that enables the app’s functionalities

Web3 architectures, however, only contain a frontend and a blockchain — there is no central database or server. Instead, apps work by deploying what’s called smart contracts (self-executing contracts) to a blockchain, often to Ethereum, the preeminent blockchain. All of this simply means that apps are no longer built with centralized structures in mind. Rather, they are composed through discursive collaboration and distributed hosting protocols like IPFS, providing developers and users alike with more autonomy, security, and trust.

Web3 is not only changing the way we interact with the web, but also making the web itself more composable.