Web 3.0 — A Vision of the Internet of the Future
Web3.0 was 2021’s buzzword and in 2022, it is said we can expect companies will try and jump on the bandwagon for this decentralized vision of the Internet. To technologists and cryptographers, Web3 has remained a theoretical grand vision for years. But, the push for a blockchain-powered future has come to dominate tech conferences and social media chatter in certain circles. It’s even forced major tech companies to assemble teams dedicated to Web3.
“For a long time, Web3 has been very theoretical, but now there is a surge of momentum to build.” Esther Crawford, Senior Project Manager at Twitter
Web3.0 represents an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web. It is defined by the technology of blockchain, the same system used by cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but aims to use an egalitarian philosophy to cut out the Internet’s central gatekeepers, such as Google, Apple, Amazon, or Facebook.
Web3.0 is the next evolution of the internet utilizing blockchain technology and the tool of decentralization. In Web2.0 you were the product as you were browsing social networks. In 3.0 it is said that you will be the owner of your content, the stuff that you post online.
“I think the properly authenticated decentralized blockchain world is coming and is much closer to being here than many people think. Of course, it’s always possible that all this tech will get built and many people will not care. But I’m more optimistic. Users generally accept defaults given by developers, and many developers really do genuinely care about decentralization and trustlessness (and growing legal issues with running centralized points of trust will push them to care more). […] It will get easier and cheaper over time as ideas like statelessness and history expiry come into play. So I see no technical reason why the future needs to look like the status quo today.” Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum.
So how do cryptocurrency ideas tie into the evolution of our current internet and what does it mean to us, as users?
The changes that Web3.0 is supposed to bring revolve around 3 major components: data, governance, and money, hopefully resolving a lot of the problems that we have on the current internet. On one hand, changing our data structures and bringing much more control over our private data, on the other hand providing a good governance layer for the internet that we’re currently lacking, enabling us to have true pier to pier transactions without middlemen. And the third part is that it could revolutionize money and value creation.
Data structures
The internet that we have today is built on the logic of stand-alone computers, where data is stored centrally and it’s processed through centralized servers. Why? Because we first had the computer and then the internet. And what the internet did, was provide the communication protocol, IP protocol, which allowed computers to communicate with each other, and they would send data packages from one computer to the other. But every time that happens a copy of that data gets created and sent to the other computer, thus leading to us losing control and ownership of that data. That’s not only a privacy issue, it’s also a big issue in the backend of e-commerce operations along with the supply chain, and goods and services. That’s why the blockchain system uses a completely novel way of saving and processing data, building on the idea of peer-to-peer technologies, which are not a new thing, but the blockchain is using it to a new level. All computers in the network have the same level of information, all data is transparent to every computer in the network, privacy is guaranteed through the use of cryptography, and the real game-changer of blockchain is that it introduced economic incentives to make sure that all computers in the network perform and behave correctly. The blockchain protocol assumes that everyone is potentially corrupt. And in order to provide for network security, it incentivizes the network actor, with a network token.
The promise that Web3.0 is trying to make regarding data, is that your digital identity will not be 100% connected to your real-world identity, which means you can view pages, download things, make purchases, or do any other activities on the internet without being traced to the real me. We can anonymize ourselves online.
“To the average person, it does sound like voodoo” said Olga Mack, entrepreneur and blockchain lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. “But when you press a button to switch on lights, do you understand how the electricity is made? You don’t have to know how electricity works to understand the benefits. The same is true of the blockchain.”
One example that is already real is distrikt.app — a decentralised social media network with a professional twist and sporting more than 80k users since its launch in July 2021.
As a social media network built 100% on the blockchain, with mobile applications already in App stores, distrikt empowers its users to connect on their own terms. Their zero-knowledge identity service provides significantly more privacy than traditional Web2 platforms, as distrikt users don’t need to provide any personal information in order to signup.
distrikt’s promise to offer a more user-centric and user-governed alternative to platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn is begging to be more and more appealing to Web3 enthusiasts.
Not only that, but distrikt will soon become truly user-governed and pass on the decision-making to its community. Users will be able to participate in governance and have a say in how the community and the platform will evolve.
For those of you who want to study more real examples of decentralised platforms, here are some more examples: LBRY, DLive 3speak, Viewly, Livepeer, THETA, Minds.
Although true believers say there is no place for Facebook in a Web3 world, Web2 companies will be folding Web3 ideas into their services to stay relevant. According to Esther Crawford, Twitter is studying ways to incorporate Web3 concepts into the social network, like one day being able to log into the social network and tweet from an account associated with a cryptocurrency, not a Twitter account. She sees the future differently: not a crypto version of Twitter replacing Twitter. But rather Twitter introducing Web3 features on top of standard Twitter.
But, when it comes to the crypto world, Web3 is already a reality. The Crypto enthusiasts are most certainly familiar with Pocket Network, the blockchain data ecosystem for Web3 applications. Pocket Network is a platform built for applications, that uses cost-efficient economics to coordinate and distribute data at scale. It enables seamless and secure interactions between blockchains and across applications. Pocket Network is the Web3 Node infrastructure that operates as a decentralised relay network to facilitate Dapps and users with Web3 access. Incentives are key for everything on the blockchain without rewards, miners/ validators won’t be there to secure the network, no one will provide liquidity and the list goes on. With Pocket, the use of blockchains can be simply integrated into websites, mobile apps, IoT, and more, giving developers the freedom to put blockchain-enabled applications into the “pocket” of every mainstream consumer.
Governance
On a second level, blockchain provides a governance tool and a novel way to organize society. It allows us to move away from the current way we organize society, but also process data and manage data on the internet — from a pyramid to a network.
If we look at the way society is organized today is in the form of a top-down organization, where you have one legal entity that is registered somewhere so you’ll know who to sue in case something goes wrong. And the relationship of the people working for that organization is managed by contracts. It assumes that we don’t fully trust each other, and while we negotiate our agreements verbally, we write them down and we sign them in the form of contracts. So if anyone doesn’t stick to their piece of the agreement we go back to the contract. The relationship between organizations, or nation-states is also managed by legal contracts. The blockchain introduced a completely novel way to manage society through the blockchain protocol. There is no centralized entity regulating the blockchain and everyone participating in the network runs in the same direction. Because the when and what — how are they incentivized or disincentivized — is defined in the protocol. Every time a network actor validates a translation according to pre-defined rules, they perform a service to the network, keep the network safe, and get rewarded with a network token. This is a new way to governance society with any centralized institution. At the heart of these protocols lies the smart contract — a piece of code that defines a rule set of who is allowed to do when and what — kind of like a digital handshake. The smart contract is automatically enforced when the majority of network actors agree that the predefined conditions have been met. This means we’re radically cutting the transnational costs of monitoring and enforcing agreements.
In Web 3.0 we can expect to reach a point on the internet where every company is run by a decentralized group, who assembles together collectively governed by blockchains and tokens, called DAO: Decentralised Autonomous Organisation.
Money
The third game changer seems to be tokens. What blockchain has allowed us to do through the back door of smart contracts, is within a few lines of code, create a token that can represent anything from a physical good to a digital good to an access right. And it would probably take us a few years to figure out what we can meaningfully do in this new token economy.
We can assume that in the next decade, you might be able to buy things on Amazon, using a Metamask and pay with Ethereum, or you can anonymously leave a “like” to one of your friends’ posts, using one of your hidden wallets, but it’s not gonna be a bunch of life-changing stuff all at once. Most likely it will be a series of ideas that grow together until centralized companies like Facebook or Google are disassembled by the legislature, while decentralized, regulated DAOs grow will replace them.
To shepherd the adoption of Web3 across the industry and bolster web3’s decentralization, this January 2022, The Graph, one of the major players, has donated $50 Million in strategic GRT sales to decentralize web for the Graph Foundation. This funding will support grants for core development, and protocol R&D and provide a runway for the strategic initiatives of the Foundation.
The Web 3.0 foundation
We are not officially in the Web3.0 phase of the Internet but the blocks are currently being built. We are now at the beginning of the Web3.0 era, which combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of Web1.0 with the advanced, modern functionality of Web 2.0. In Web3.0, ownership and control are decentralized. Users and builders can own pieces of internet services by owning tokens, both non-fungible (NFTs) and fungible.
It would probably take us a few good years to figure out what this new technology can do. But technology is just a tool, and how we use that tool is neither inherently good nor bad. How we use that tool is up to us, and we should be very careful how we use this powerful tool of blockchain technology because if we don’t design these blockchains properly, we might design a machine that acts against us. One aspect is governance: who decides what rules of these blockchains and smart contracts are? Who decides what rules we write into that code? Because the code itself sets the technological limitations of what is possible and what’s not, it sets the boundaries of what we can do. And of course, many super-smart engineers are working on this cutting-edge technology, but they are not governance experts and we need these two branches working together to decide how they want to write this code. Because what this code says is automatically enforced is not a technological question only. It’s a governance question, it’s an ethical question, it’s an economic and organizational question, etc. what we’re seeing is that a bunch of very, very talented people, predominantly engineers, are creating these operating systems for our potential future societies. And we need to make sure we don’t run into the same problems that we ran into Web 2.0. We need to make sure we’re not creating protocol bias just like we created algorithms bias.
