All about Web 3 for the geek ones!

The World Has Never Been Connected So Much

The smartphone share of all internet traffic rose from 0.9 to 54% between 2009 and 2022. This dramatic share increase occurred due to network infrastructure developments, enhanced capabilities in smartphone production lines, faster and cheaper wireless and cell connections, and many more new technologies. Here’s the question we must focus on: what could be a significant driver for the remaining growth of mobile phones in 2022?

The following five to ten years will be even more connected and sophisticated, thanks to technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and blockchain. Let’s explore the latter in more detail.

Web 1 and Web 2

In the 90s and 2000s, Web1 (the original version) came into our daily lives and made it fancier but slow. It allowed users to create and read web pages through a hyperlinked information system. Web1 also contributed significant fundamental technologies to our lives, such as HTML, URL, URI and HTTP.

Web1 offered users decentralized (not controlled by a single entity), read-only, and open-source content in limited formats until Web2 arrived around 2004.

Web2 provided centralized internet, and there were gatekeepers. The internet became a place where end-users could also generate content under the control of web platform owners. On top of the core value change, enormous technological developments shaped Web2, such as cloud technologies. Whereas Web1 relied on expensive data centers, Web2 was powered by cheap and fast cloud storage.

People always try to be more connected every day — that’s a given. When the first commercial telephone service was launched in 1927, people paid $75 for a 3-minute phone call. This love of connectivity made communication cheaper and helped it evolve. It all started with expensive and limited phone calls, but now, Web2 uses social media and endless loops to keep us connected.

Let’s consider how far social media has come. In 2010, people were adding friends, messaging, and liking photos on social media platforms. Today, Facebook has 2.9 billion monthly active users, YouTube has 2.5 billion, WhatsApp 2 billion, and Instagram 1.4 billion. These platforms have become mystical realms that know and control everything in their districts with the data people produce and consume.

Web 3

One of the misunderstandings in the terminology of Web3 is about more than just crypto and blockchain. The World Wide Web Consortium explains it as a new approach for linking data through a semantic layer (AI-supported) that provides unique information to websites and applications.

The core value proposed is to give the ownership of your data to you, not to a web platform owner. This problem was observed after users of Web2 became an entire monetization[HH3] point with everything they do (click, watch, play and search).

And yes, as a significant differentiating point, Web3 is based on blockchain technology for enabling distributed consensus mechanisms. But payment and transactions, social networks, and personalization (cookies) are also expected to be disrupted.

Unfortunately, we can’t do a deep dive into Web3 here, but in brief, the early application areas are:

• Decentralized Finance (Defi)
• Gaming
• Utilities
• Art and Collectibles
• Metaverse

What does the future look like for a Web3 Mobile App Ecosystem?

As mentioned above, 6.64 billion people have access to smartphones — but just 68 million people have a blockchain wallet. Considering most internet traffic comes from mobile, there is considerable growth potential (>x100) for the collaboration of the blockchain and mobile phone ecosystem.

Most of our daily activities and functions (payments, Defi, gaming, art, sports and music) are being trialed in Web3. Even though most projects could be better, developers keep coming up with new ideas to find product-market fit and transfer the same user experience quality from Web2 to Web3. A few examples are:

• Medium => Mirror XYZ
• Chrome => Brave
• Spotify => Audius

As we said, mobile is the leading driver of internet usage (it looks like it will keep its position). While mobile phones were just communication devices in the early 2000s, today, a mobile phone is a wallet, a gaming hub, a camera, or a calendar. It’s no surprise that Solana Labs launched Mobile Stack SDK for its new Android mobile phone project, Saga. There is an enormous application ecosystem built on Web2, and it is inevitable that Web2 technology companies will be disrupted if they cannot adapt their vision of applications to Web3.

A mobile phone ecosystem project powered by blockchain, Saga is one of the first and leading mobile stack projects in the Web3 ecosystem, focusing on functions like mobile wallet adoption (a protocol for connecting the web and native apps to mobile wallets), payments, seed vault, and dAppstore.

Saga is a bridge between Web2 and Web3 for now, but will this be the case in the future? Our smartphones adapt themselves to dApps more. We know we cannot manage hundreds of Web2 applications, and this rule will probably stay the same. So under this strict security and frictionless user experience, a considerable user potential waits for the dApps of Web3.

Final thoughts

The blockchain market is growing fast! The market is expected to reach $162 billion in 2027, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 70%. But even though this market is expanding rapidly, we can’t hope for blockchain to be adopted into our daily lives quickly.

Market barriers must be analyzed carefully regarding regulations, tech infrastructure, human resources, UI/UX concerns, hardware accessibility, and socio-economic factors.

All these barriers make Web3 a perfect disruptive trend. If it succeeds, our connected world will be mobile-first, secure, decentralized, autonomous, and end-user-owned.