What is web3?
The best part about working in technology is the ever-changing landscape of tools and opportunities. Over the last few years, a new tool has begun maturing that will deliver more opportunity to create and capture value than any tools that have come before. Distributed ledger technology enables developers to coordinate financial incentives in a few lines of code.
Where “web2.0” enabled developers create “information” web apps, web3 lets developers create “value” web apps. Some may hear this and think “We already have stripe, they are awesome” — and I don’t disagree. While Stripe and their competitors make it easy to interact with the traditional banking system, web3 is something very different.
Right now, web3 mostly refers to apps that allow users to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. What makes Ethereum so special is that is was the first blockchain to have a “turing complete” language. This language enables something called smart contracts, or “persistent scripts” as Vitlaik now prefers. Smart contracts can hold value (cryptocurrency) and distribute it based on their logic.
Ethereum is by far the more robust and welcoming developer community at the moment. Though technologies like Lightning network are rising stars, for now, Ethereum is where it’s at. The most popular developer tool, Truffle Suite, just passed one million downloads. Despite the fluctuation in pricing, developer interest in blockchain has seen a steady increase in recent years.
Though there aren’t a lot of daily active users on many Ethereum apps, there are a few unique and robust applications that have taken off in their own way. Most notably the GitGoin ecosystem has proved to be a vibrant source of web3 activity. On this platform, anyone can issue a bounty in the form of a smart contract. These bounties are associated with feature requests or bug fixes on open source repositories. Though niche, it proves that programmatic financial incentives can turn into real value.
Beyond applications like GitCoin and others that focus on the movement of value, there is another application type that is arguably just as exciting. Crypto Kitties is a game that only the internet could love. These “Collectable. Breedable. Adorable.” cats are unique digital assets. What that means is that the holder of a given Crypto Kitty has complete ownership of that digital asset, a truly groundbreaking idea. If individuals can own digital objects, a new category of assets can be create and traded with lightning speed.
More recently, Gods Unchained launched in the depths of the bear market, and the results were promising. Gods Unchained is a turn-based competitive trading card game with the highest production value of any blockchain game so far. Though still small for a traditional game, GU’s launch was by all accounts a big success. To date they’ve sold over 2 million cards and an ultra-rare card was auctioned for well over 100 $ETH. This launch, even in such a quiet period, is yet another example of why web3 is exciting and worth exploring.
While still in its infancy, web3 is the most exciting place to be as a technologist of any stripe. Though this blog series focuses on developers, I hope to encourage anyone and everyone to get excited about the possibilities. Beyond developed nations, DLT is having profound effects in the communities that are embracing it. Rarely does one get the opportunity to create a new platform, but web3 is that opportunity right now.
