The Top 3 Tech Advancements That Will Skyrocket Web3 Growth in the Next 3 Years

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

Over the past few months, I’ve been closely following the progress and innovations within the web3 sphere. I’m incredibly optimistic about several key technological advancements in this space, as they promise to address critical issues and propel the industry forward. In the following blog post, I’ll provide a brief overview of these technologies and share my bullish outlook on their potential impact 🚀

Account Abstraction

One significant obstacle preventing many individuals from entering the web3 space is the user experience. Specifically, users must learn how to use a wallet and store their seed phrase, which can be a tedious and confusing task.

Ethereum has two types of accounts: Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) and Smart Contract Accounts(CAs). Externally Owned Accounts are controlled by individuals and are associated with public and private key pairs, which are used to sign and authorise transactions. Smart Contract Accounts, on the other hand, are controlled by code and execute automatically when certain conditions are met.

Credits : Preethi_Kasireddy

What if we had something in between these two to make user experience better ?

What if we could “program” the wallets ?

The goal of Account Abstraction is to merge the two existing types of accounts in Ethereum, EOAs and CAs, into a single contract account that can handle both token transactions and contract creation.

So what ? What did that solve ?

We unlock new features 🔓:

1. Multi-call📞: Allows smart contracts to execute multiple function calls in a single transaction, reducing transaction costs and improving efficiency.
2. Session keys🔑: Provides an additional layer of security by allowing users to authorise specific actions or transactions within a smart contract without revealing their private keys.
3. Auto-payments💲: Enables smart contracts to automatically pay for transaction fees on behalf of users, simplifying the user experience and improving accessibility.
4. Social recovery🤝: Provides a mechanism for users to recover lost or stolen private keys by relying on a trusted group of friends or family members to verify their identity and help them regain access to their account.

Read more here.

zkEVM

As we witness a surge in user adoption, the most common complaint from users will likely be the high cost of gas fees. The question then becomes: how can we minimise these fees and make the platform more accessible to a wider audience 🧐?

Enter zkEVM

zkEVM is a solution that helps reduce the high cost of using Ethereum by moving some of the work that is currently being done on the Ethereum network to a different network. This makes it easier and cheaper to use smart contracts, allowing more people to participate in the Ethereum network.

Despite being considered by many, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, as the future of Ethereum scaling, live implementations of zk-rollups have not received much attention. However, on March 24th, the zkSync Era was launched to mainnet, and soon after, Polygon launched their own Polygon zkEVM to mainnet on the following Monday. These recent developments have brought more attention to the potential of zk-rollups for scaling Ethereum.

Despite being in the early stages, both networks have already secured partnerships with major decentralized applications (DApps) such as Sushi, Balancer, and others. As these dApps are deployed on the networks in the near future, we may see a significant increase in the number of users on these zkEVMs.

Reference 1 : What is zkEVM?

Reference 2 : ZkSync Era vs Polygon ZkEVM

ZK Tech & Web3 Infra

ZK or zero-knowledge proofs is a cryptographic technique that allows one party to prove to another that they know a particular piece of information or secret without revealing the secret itself.

In the Web3 space, ZK technology is being used to improve privacy, scalability, and security of dApps(everything🤌)

Okay, but where is this used ? Give me an example ?

Since Ethereum is a public blockchain, it records every transaction made on the network, making none of the transactions private. However, to address this issue, we have Tornado Cash, a decentralised privacy-focused solution that provides users with a way to make private transactions.

It works by using a smart contract to pool users’ Ether or ERC-20 tokens together and then mixing them up before distributing them back to the users. This makes it difficult to trace the original source and destination of the funds, providing greater privacy for users.

During a gold rush, sell shovels

Implying that while the hype around cryptocurrencies and decentralised applications may come and go, the underlying infrastructure that supports these technologies will always be valuable💪.

In traditional centralised web infrastructure, a single company or entity controls the servers and storage, which creates a single point of failure and potential for censorship. Decentralised infrastructure, on the other hand, is composed of a network of nodes, each storing a copy of the data and running the necessary computations. This makes the infrastructure more resilient, secure, and censorship-resistant.

Examples of Web3 infrastructure projects include:

1. InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) — a peer-to-peer protocol that enables the creation of a decentralised and distributed file system.
2. Golem Network — a decentralised supercomputer network that enables users to rent out their unused computing power and earn cryptocurrency in exchange.

The combination of ZK and web3 infrastructure has the potential to revolutionise the way we interact and transact with each other on the internet✨

I really hope this post was informative and helped you understand new concepts in web3. Thank you so much for taking the time to read it! If you found this post useful, please consider sharing it with your friends and colleagues and give me a follow. Your support means a lot to me 🥳.