Web 3.0

Since the mid-2000s, companies like Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon have taken over the internet. The advent of smart devices helped these companies provide their services to millions of users via mobile apps developed under their ecosystem and accessed via the internet. In order to grow, these companies provided their services for free. In exchange, they collected and centralized vast amounts of user data.

This doesn’t come without problems: innovation has slowed down because startups or creators can’t work on their own products and instead need to worry about competing with these powerful giants. Social media platforms are riddled with fake news and controversies and this has, in turn, caused societal conflict. Faulty data policies and their consequential misuse can also cause trouble, as seen in the recent case of Cambridge Analytica.

Blockchain can impact more than just finance.

If you haven’t yet, check out our first blog post in this series. In it, we mentioned that all these issues have caused people to turn from centralized services and work on their own innovate decentralized ones.

Decentralization Is The Way

To get your mind racing and provide inspiration, here are some amazing blockchain-based applications:

• Blockstack: Blockstack is a new internet for decentralized applications. It has been in production for 3+ years and has several applications built on it. The founders, Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali, realized that the internet needed a more responsible design. The internet has become such an integral part of people’s lives, and given the amount of content moderation and data breaches that have occurred in the past few years, they realized that there were certain flaws in the design of the internet that needed to be fixed. A decentralized internet, with no central command, could solve most of these issues.

• Mastodon: Mastodon is a web-based open-source decentralized platform for micro-blogging. Whoa! What does all of that mean? Think Twitter, but with no central authority running the platform and any programmer in the world being able to see its source code. Eugen Rochko is the engineer who built the platform after he spotted several flaws with Twitter. In a Medium article, Learning from Twitter’s mistakes, he says, “ As an end-user, you have the ability to choose an instance with the rules and policies that you agree with (or roll your own, if you are technically inclined)”. This makes for smaller tightly knit communities free of trolls. Mastodon has since grown to almost a million users.

• OpenMined: Artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm, and this has all been possible due to the massive amounts of data collected. This has led some people to argue in favor of centralized architecture, stating that if all our data wasn’t in one place then we would never have amazing things like Siri or Netflix recommendations. OpenMined proved them wrong. An open-source project started by Andrew Trask, OpenMined lets machine learning engineers create and train models on real-world user data without compromising on its privacy. The project is still at an early stage and an architecture that would take days to explain. Nonetheless, it gives hope that the AI-giants can be toppled.

• Freenet: Freenet is a network aimed at activists and people living in repressive regimes. It uses a web of trust in high-security mode, which allows users on the network to be effectively undetectable. Freenet has been based on its contributor, Ian Clarke’s paper, “A Distributed Decentralized Information Storage and Retrieval System”. He started the project in July 1999 and a lot of contributors have joined since. Freenet gives its users the freedom of speech while simultaneously protecting their identities.

This is only a small fraction of the projects trying to solve problems in the space. You can find more inspiration here.

But Why Build Blockchain Now?

A natural question to ask after reading about these platforms is: Why now? Why not five years from now? Or five years ago? There’s a few answers.

As mentioned earlier, big companies have built centralized platforms that they are in charge of; places where their rules apply. This encouraged people to make platforms that were censorship free. Another reason is data ownership. For example, if you wanted to move from Apple Music to Spotify there is no simple way in moving your data between these platforms because Apple and Spotify both have your ownership over your data.

In a decentralized internet, you and only you have ownership over your data.

Advances in distributed systems and cryptography have also helped decentralized systems scale from 1 to 1,000 users. And last but not least, Bitcoin. It’s easy to see Bitcoin as a volatile cryptocurrency with scalability issues and a cult following, but you can also look at it as a blockchain application which shows us that the decentralized internet can be scaled and grown to a million users.

With this is mind, Jump Genesis was created. Founders and Jump want UIUC students to build startups, discover product-market fits and make business plans but with one thing at it’s core: decentralization. Many people don’t know about these decentralized applications, and as an entrepreneur, it’s your responsibility to create disruptive applications to show people that there is another way.