Beginning in 2020, Web 3 has evolved from a hazy notion to a hotly debated subject, coupled with another term, metaverse, in 2021. Once significant players in the game of Web 2, existing tech giants have been known recently to invest considerable capital in "the next generation of the Internet." In addition, the lure of NFT seems to have extended outside the tech circle, as we have seen the music industry throw itself into this area.
As data from Coinmarketcap shows, the total crypto market has reached $2 trillion, with a more mature industry ecosystem involving various sectors.
Popularity, however, is not everything. Last year, Elon Musk teased the Web 3, saying, "I'm not suggesting web3 is real – seems more marketing buzzword than reality right now", and he is not the only tech-savvy celebrity who gave negative feedback on this hazy concept. Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO, argued that "you don't own 'web3.' The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It's ultimately a centralized entity with a different label."
As two of the world's best-known tech billionaires have been voicing their not-that-optimistic thoughts on Web 3, there would be every reason to doubt the future of this concept.
What Web 3 Intends to Achieve
"The spirit [of the World Wide Web] there was very decentralized…that feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we've lost." In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2018, Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, expressed his disappointment with the current Internet because those tech giants now monopolize almost everything online.
Web 3 is not a technology, but a term related to cryptocurrency and blockchain, coined by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum.
In April 2014, after accomplishing the Ethereum Yellow Paper, Gavin Wood outlined his vision of Web 3 in his article "Why We Need Web 3.0". As he wrote, "Web 3.0 is an inclusive set of protocols to provide building blocks for application makers. These building blocks take the place of traditional web technologies…but present a whole new way of creating applications."
In Web 3, we use web browsers but call them "wallets" or "key stores." Gavin said that browsers (and components like hardware wallets) would represent a person's assets and identity online, allowing people to pay for goods and services online or prove who we are without contacting a bank or identity service. Trusted parties, insurance companies, backup services, etc., will still be needed. However, their actions will be verifiable, and the tasks will be commoditized. In a global, open, and transparent market, these service providers will be forced to compete, which will relieve web users of price-gouging and rent-seeking.
"Web 3.0 will engender a new global digital economy, creating new business models and markets to go with them, busting platform monopolies like Google and Facebook, and giving rise to vast levels of bottom-up innovation. Cheap government attacks on our privacy and liberty like widespread data trawling, censorship and propaganda, will become more difficult."
To this end, Gavin hoped to reinvent the Internet at the software level through P2P protocols to create a new architecture and provide decentralized network services. Even maturing gradually, the architecture of Ethereum still cannot meet his Web3 vision.
In China, Alibaba's $18.2 billion fine and the $3.442 billion antitrust penalties against Meituan last year drew widespread attention from the public. While people are figuring out how to reclaim the power of the Internet giants to avoid monopoly, Web3 has been a familiar face in this kind of discussion with people's high expectations for its capability to "reclaim and control the power of the Internet giants."
Several characteristics distinguish the new version of the Internet:
Typical bandwidth of 10 M;
Introduce the idea of personal portals that offer individualized aggregation services depending on user preferences;
Establish a system for mutually-centered transformation between individuals and organizations so that individuals can reach their economic potential.
However, these are just a pie in the sky at the moment without practical operation models, which could be more intuitive with actual cases.
In 2021, a decentralized autonomous organization called ConstitutionDAO announced that it would participate in the Sotheby's auction to purchase one of the 13 surviving copies of the United States Constitution dating back to 1787. To raise the money, the group conducted a frenzied, weeklong online crowdfunding campaign that many Twitter users mocked at the beginning. They joked that before ConstitutionDAO considered buying this document, the organization might first need a $10 million ticket to enter the Sotheby.
But the enthusiasm should not be overlooked. The funding grew dramatically in the first two days, with an estimated $2 million daily, reaching $47 million by the auction day.
Despite their eye-catching bids, the group did not win the document, which was won by Chicago hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin, who came out on top with a winning bid of $43.2 million.
A slightly disappointing story, but it shows us some of the spirits of Web 3:
First, Web3 encourages the openness of rights, which unleashes the authors' carefully restricted, virtually monopolistic rights.
In this scenario, the $10 million admission price may have highlighted that this auction would be an exclusive game for the few, but the crowdsourcing effort has made it open to more people.
Web 2 has been accused of having an irreversible monopoly. Users on services like TikTok seem to have flexibility as they are both content makers and consumers, but the fact is that it is considerably less attractive. Because platforms, not artists or consumers, still possess the power of content judgment.
While in Web 3, we would see more openness. Users have complete freedom to access different Internet applications and will not be restricted by third-party subjects. Decentralization, the capability to control data and information, and online asset building will be the main features of this era. In other words, at this stage, users can produce content and control their content through multiple protocols.
Co-building, co-sharing, and co-creating among users is the second and most crucial point.
Assuming that Constitution DAO successfully auctioned the Constitution of the United States, it would be shared by all users who have contributed to the project, who would decide how, where, and when to exhibit it. This is why this innovative project sounds so attractive, and the decentralized autonomous organization could have raised $47 million in just one week.
Third, personal privacy appears to be hard to protect under Web 2. Nowadays, it is no longer a secret that famous platforms collect user data for profit. At the Web 3 stage, with decentralized applications and data availability on the blockchain, user behavior generated data, and even application protocols can be guaranteed.
In Web 3, developers typically do not build and deploy applications that run on a single server or store data in a single database (often hosted and managed by a single cloud provider).
Web3 applications, also known as dApps (decentralized applications), run on a blockchain, on a decentralized network of many peer nodes (servers), or both, resulting in a cryptographic economic protocol.
Developers can be encouraged to provide the highest quality of services to other users and achieve a stable and secure decentralized network.
The tricky "Web 2.5"
Web 3 will just be "Web 2.5" if it is Web 2-based.
Whether we could actualize Web3 is still debatable, and if we create the next generation of the Internet using a Web2-based approach, we may only end up with Web 2.5. Web 2.5 is not decentralized but rather polycentric; it is a vertical blockchain ledger linking businesses and governments, whereas the financial sector is defined by distributed finance.
The consequence of building Web 2-based projects under Web 3 is that such projects boasting of decentralization will fail the target to do so, and the security problems in Web2 still exist.
So far, Web 3 projects or dApps still rely heavily on Web 2 components: using centralized domains that can be taken over or interrupted at any time; centralized storage that is censorable and transparent to mass surveillance; and browser extensions like Metamask or Phantom that Google can disable at any time, which will immediately confuse 99% of decentralized application users about how to access them.
BadgerDAO is a DeFi project from which hackers stole $120 million for its centralized user interface. In February, 254 tokens were stolen from the NFT trading platform OpenSea within only three hours, sparking widespread alarm among many users.
The above illustrates why this "Web 2.5" approach is unreliable.
Where is Web 3 heading?
To some, "Web 2.5" cannot be the basis for Web 3, and the only way to truly reinvent the old Internet world is to implement it with decentralized components.
Point Labs, a blockchain technology company, calls this Internet of which the components have been recreated and the decentralized Point network. Unlike the existing Web 2 scaffolding, it is a virtual space wholly disconnected from the old Internet.
Founders of Point Labs also give a fairly straightforward definition of Web 3: A completely decentralized Internet, free of censorship or mass surveillance, and empowered with direct data ownership for audiences, without technology giants or dictatorial control.
PointLabs' Web3 roadmap (source: https://roadmap.pointnetwork.io/)
In addition, Point Labs has developed a roadmap to Web 3 that is updated frequently. It is not just the typical banded block on the landing page; instead, they have made it a Trello-like site. It has two zones: the main zone showing the infrastructure needed for a decentralized Internet (basically completed) and the dApp zone listing use cases and potential decentralized applications when the main area is operational.
But not that fast. Not all techies would favor a decentralized infrastructure. As Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of encrypted messaging app Signal, questioned Web 3 in a blog, "When the technology itself is more conducive to stasis than movement, that's a problem." "I people don't want to run their servers."
But perhaps this is the true destination of decentralization. With decentralized soil, real decentralized dApps, social networks, development forums, instant messaging networks, and decentralized companies can grow.
Developers of Web 3
The purpose of Web 3 is to construct a decentralized world, and the most sought-after programming language for Web 3 development is Golang, followed by Java, JavaScript, and Rust. Web 3 roles outside of China often include project managers, product managers, or those that work on smart contracts, front-end development, 3D design, graphic design, back-end development, etc.
In China, Web 3 roles are mainly concerned with blockchain, smart contracts, front-end developers, product managers, etc., and pay between CNY 24,000 to CNY 80,000 a month.
Conclusion
Two years ago, you may still have thought that Web 3 was some daydream, but today we may have to consider it differently, which means it is no longer simply a pure theory as Elon Musk imagined.
Whether it is Web 2, which has significantly improved our lives and work but established a monopoly of power, or the illusory Web 2.5, or like Point Labs, which is pursuing the spiritual core of "decentralization" for Web 3, all these are the outcomes of technical and social advancement.
There is no method for Web 2 and Web 3 to replace each other since the combination and separation between centralization and decentralization is such a difference. Only the cohabitation of the two types may attain harmony. Just as the opponents of Web 3 also realize the value of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, Web 3 has revealed a trend of technology forward: the importance of individuals is respected, and the value of sharing and co-creating will eventually be unleashed and actually enhanced.
