Jan.2022, [email protected]
Data Source: Footprint Analytics
Former social media giant Twitter Spaces chief data scientist Julien Gaillard announced on Twitter that he is leaving the social media giant to serve as the head of data science at DeFi lending giant Aave.
Source: Twitter
Previously, Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave, said to the public that he was considering building Twitter on Ethereum and establishing a decentralized social platform for Web3. Julien Gaillard said that the core value of Web3 lies in its decentralization, innovation, fairness and experimentation, in its open source and transparency.
Meanwhile, David Marcus, head of Facebook's (now known as Meta) cryptocurrency project, also started his own Web3 startup project on January 1, 2022 .
Another Meta employee, Evan Cheng, also left in September last year to start MystyLab , which focuses on blockchain infrastructure . In an interview , he revealed that 80% of his team's employees are from the Web2 Internet industry.
The world of Web3
Web3 is a new iteration of the idea of the World Wide Web. The core of its development based on blockchain technology lies in decentralization and decentralization to the people.
web1 is a static read-only network, Web2 is a social network that everyone can contribute to, and Web3 is a distributed decentralized network.
Although the specific concept of Web3 is still somewhat vague at present, in general, the management rights and supervision rights of Web2 belonging to Internet companies are more widely distributed through the form of discussion-proposal-voting-implementation. The right to decide will be assigned to each Internet participant, who will decide the direction of the Internet platform or project.
The distributed technology of blockchain is the core of Web3.
According to Footprint Analytics , the total market capitalization of the global crypto market has doubled in the past year and now exceeds $2 trillion. The blockchain world is developing rapidly.
Footprint Analytics - Crypto Market Cap
Blockchain originated from Bitcoin and was born in 2008 in Satoshi Nakamoto's paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" (Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System), which does not rely on credit intermediaries. Electronic payment system. Due to the distrust of the centralized regulatory system and financial system, Bitcoin chooses to put its trust in a distributed, decentralized public ledger, a decentralized consensus mechanism - the blockchain, so that it can be protected from Audit by centralized institutions.
As a pioneer in the application layer of blockchain technology, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is an important step for the Internet to move towards Web3. So far, in the application layer of blockchain technology, the field of decentralized finance (DeFi) still occupies a major position. Footprint Analytics has counted the total lock-up (TVL) of decentralized financial projects in the past year. It can be seen from this that since 2020, more and more funds have flowed into the field of decentralized finance, and decentralized finance has ushered in Great development.
Footprint Analytics - DeFi TVL
With the gradual maturity of blockchain technology, blockchain application projects similar to decentralized finance have also achieved remarkable results. Decentralized autonomy (DAO) is widely used in blockchain projects, and NFT, Metaverse and other tracks are ushered in With explosive growth, data cloud storage is becoming more and more mature, people gradually want to push this restriction on centralized rights to all aspects of the Internet, and promote the development of the Internet in the direction of Web3.
What problem does Web3 solve?
In the current Web2 era, the online world is controlled by a few large Internet companies. Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook determine the recommendation mechanism of most of the content through big data algorithms, and also determine the rules of speech to a large extent. Therefore, people are gradually dissatisfied with the privacy and speech issues of Web2, and want to escape the speech environment controlled by a few technology companies.
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Private issues
Tech companies collect a large amount of user data, which is mainly used to improve their content recommendation mechanisms and provide better services to users. But at the same time, data security and personal privacy issues have raised concerns. In 2018, Cambridge Analytica, a British consultancy, was revealed to have obtained the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent to help in the previous US election. This has caused great distrust among users of centralized technology companies.
In November 2021, a poll conducted by The Washington Post showed that 72% of the public did not trust Facebook at all or at all.
At present, government legislation is mainly used to solve similar data and privacy abuses, but when the public's trust in the government is also reduced, it may be a better way to decentralize power.
In the field of Web3, people save data through distributed data storage to avoid personal data being used by centralized institutions. At present, some projects have made some attempts, such as decentralized storage Arweave , Secret Network specially built for data privacy, and so on.
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freedom of speech
In January 2021, Twitter banned former US President Donald Trump's account for inciting violence, sparking a worldwide discussion of free speech.
At the heart of these discussions is whether a social media company has the right to self-censor speech. But if the Web3 era really comes, if the rights can be distributed to every interconnected user, will the world have a freer network environment?
The Conundrum on the Road to Web3
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Whether capital is willing to give up centralized power
On the road to Web3, one of the conundrums is: Can people really compete with tech giants, or capital, and get rights?
Obviously, quite a few people don't believe it. On December 21, 2021, Twitter founder and Block CEO Jack tweeted that he believes that people can't own Web3, only capital can.
Source: Twitter
Web3 requires technology and capital, and whether tech giants and venture capital firms feel that decentralization makes sense is crucial to the evolution of the Internet. The final form of Web3 largely depends on the attitude of technology and capital. Only with the support of technology and capital can the new form of the Internet, Web3, be formed more quickly.
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The entry barrier of Web3 is much higher than that of Web2
In addition to the doubts about capital and technology giants, the high threshold in the blockchain field is also one of the things people worry about. As of 0:00 on January 18, the total number of DeFi users was 4.36 million. The gap with the traditional financial field is largely due to the high threshold in the blockchain field. Compared with traditional finance, which has already matured, DeFi is more difficult to get started.
The same goes for other areas of the blockchain application layer. After people get used to centralized tech companies, it will always take a certain amount of time to accept brand new platforms and systems. The advent of the Web2 era has lowered the threshold for contributing on the Internet, allowing everyone to contribute content on the Internet. Different from the low threshold that everyone can join the Web2 network, it seems that Web3 still needs more efforts from everyone in terms of access threshold.
Both the blockchain and bitcoin fields have active evangelists to spread knowledge and ideas. How long does it take for Web3 to come? It also depends on the actions of Web3 evangelists and the development of technology.
The future of Web3
The journey to Web3 is still far away, and it needs everyone who believes in open source, transparency, and equality to promote it. Although the current Web3 is still in its infancy, a group of Web3 supporters are working hard to preach and build infrastructure. I believe that the era when Internet users have more rights will come soon.
About Footprint Analytics:
Footprint Analytics is a one-stop visual blockchain data analysis platform. Footprint assisted in solving the problem of data cleaning and integration on the chain, allowing users to enjoy a zero-threshold blockchain data analysis experience for free. With more than a thousand tabulation templates and a drag-and-drop charting experience, anyone can build their own personalized data charts within 10 seconds, easily gain insight into the data on the chain, and understand the stories behind the data.
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