Web3 has emerged as an attempt to bring together blockchain, smart contracts and decentralized applications, but its true efficacy is elusive.
Web3, as envisioned by the Web3 Foundation, will be a public internet where data and content are registered on blockchains, tokenized or managed and accessed on a peer-to-peer distributed network.
Web3 promises to be a decentralized, immutable version of the web, without middlemen, and with the same capabilities as cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and new types of decentralized applications based on distributed ledgers (DAPPs) cryptographically verifiable.
If all of this sounds complicated, that's because it is. As it stands, Web3 is a somewhat nebulous concept, still defined as a more desirable look and feel for the web rather than a tangible and accessible technology stack for developers to build on.
This ambiguity has led to some degree of disagreement across the industry on the term, with some hailing Web3 as a revolutionary way to return the internet to its libertarian roots, while prominent skeptics such as crypto-optimists Elon Musk, the author, believes that Web3 is a "marketing buzzword"
The origin of Web3
Web3 was first described by Gavin Wood, one of the creators of the Ethereum blockchain. In a 2014 blog post, Wood envisioned "Web 3.0" as an encrypted online space in response to privacy concerns raised by Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations about global surveillance.
In Web3, he wrote, “We assume that information is public, we publish it. We assume it is unanimously agreed information, we put it on the consensus ledger. We assume it is private information, we keep it secret and never reveal it.” .
The model will be "mathematically enforced" by cryptography, in which transactions will be verified and added to the blockchain for universal transparency and irrevocability.
In a November 2021 Wired interview, Wood further refined that definition to "less trust, more truth."
The term Web3 won't really catch on until 2021, however, when venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon start referring to Web3 as an "Internet owned by builders and users, orchestrated in tokens."
As a big investor in this space, Andreessen Horowitz has a lot of experience in the Web3 game, so something helpful has to be done, and critics like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey are more than happy to call Web3 as "a centralized entity with a different label"
Web 1.0 and Web 2.0
If Web3 is the next iteration of the internet, how exactly is it different from Web1.0 and Web2.0?
From 1990 to around 2004, Web 1.0 was the first iteration of the modern Internet. In the Web 1.0 era, users typically used static web pages, where read-only content was created and distributed by a small group of gatekeepers like Yahoo and AOL.
Web 2.0 is a dynamic, interactive Web in which static web pages are linked together by applications and user-generated content. Web 2.0 is ruled by a series of dominant platforms, such as the market power of FAANG companies Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, all of which serve the exchange of personal data to some extent.
Web3 differs from Web2.0 in that it removes these powerful gatekeepers and increases the equality of the Internet. On the Internet, users are rewarded through ownership of various tokens while keeping their data private and secure on a shared, distributed, tamper-proof ledger.
"Essentially, it means that I personally can be a provider or co-provider of this overall service as easily as anyone in the world," Wood told WIRED.
This is reflected in the Web3 Foundation's mission statement to "foster cutting-edge applications of decentralized web software protocols" through a "decentralized and fair Internet where users control their own data, identity, and destiny."
This idea naturally gave rise to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs, which are highly democratic internet communities with shared goals and no leadership structure. Of course, one person's egalitarian network could be another's unregulated brutal West.
Web3 and Tim Berners Lee described it back in 1999 as Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web, which focused on making the Internet machine-readable, but this vision has largely yet to materialize.
Web3 stack
Some engineers have tried to define the Web3 stack as it currently exists, but it is not an easy exercise.
Nader Dabit, former AWS Senior Developer Advocate and now Developer Relations Engineer at Web3 company Edge & Node, attempted to provide a high-level overview of the Web3 stack, including:
blockchain
Blockchain development environment
file storage
P2P database
API (Index and Query)
identity
Clients (frameworks and libraries)
other protocols
This is obviously very different from the three-tier architecture of web development commonly used today, which consists of:
front-end web server
Middle Tier Application Server
Backend database or data store
Preethi Kasireddy is uniquely positioned to work at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and crypto exchange Coinbase. Her blog post on Web3 Architecture demonstrates a development model where "you write smart contracts that define the logic of your application and deploy them to a decentralized state machine [i.e. the Ethereum blockchain]."
Writing smart contracts may itself require learning a new programming language such as Solidity, Vyper, or increasingly Rust. You then need to understand how to deploy to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, or a similar execution mechanism for your blockchain of choice.
Developers also need to master the mechanics of "signing" transactions to the blockchain, and MetaMask established itself as an early industry-standard tool for this process.
Next, Kasireddy discussed the scaling issues of building applications on Ethereum. “Anyone who has built applications on ethereum knows that storing everything on the blockchain can get very expensive, very fast,” she wrote. This requires "a decentralized off-chain storage solution such as IPFS [Interplanetary File System] or Swarm."
As more developers flood the field, and as the tools mature, these issues will likely be resolved. Projects like Polygon are already working on solutions to blockchain scaling problems. But for now, developing applications on the nascent Web3 stack looks challenging.
As Kasireddy himself writes, "If all of this is making your head spin, you're not alone. Piecing together all these tools is complex and can make for a painful development experience. But don't worry, we're starting to see new development Frameworks, they really improve the developer experience."
Web3 application
A question often asked by Web3 skeptics is, where are the applications? As outlined above, with a new, complex application stack emerging, it's no surprise that we haven't seen a ton of killer Web3 apps hit the market yet.
While Web3 promises to bring the underlying technology of NFTs and cryptocurrency ownership to potentially new areas of the web, that promise has yet to be delivered.
Early Web3 projects were often defined by their lack of accessibility and subtle user experiences. To access most Web3 applications, users need a crypto wallet, most likely a new browser, an understanding of a whole new world of terminology, and a willingness to pay for the volatile "gas" required to perform operations on the Ethereum blockchain . These are significant barriers to accessing the Internet for ordinary Internet users.
While decentralized social networks Mastodon and GitHub clone Radicle are built on some Web3 principles, like the Brave browser, most existing Web3 applications are for trading crypto assets or betting crypto on casino games .
"If Web3 is going to be the future of identity or social media, we need to ask ourselves, is there any evidence that adoption of Web3 is really better than previous generations of Internet technology?" asks Tim O'Reilly, who created Web2. 0 for this term.
The Web3 Foundation lists several projects on its website, but these are mostly focused on building the underlying protocols needed for interoperable Web3.
As Kevin Werbach, author of Blockchain and New Architectures of Trust, told TechCrunch: “Many so-called Web3 solutions are not as decentralized as they appear, and others have yet to show they The scalability, security, and accessibility are sufficient to meet the needs of the mass market."
Getting Started with Web3
Ready to get started? There are many places where you can learn more about the core principles and technologies of Web3.
Dabit of Edge & Node recommends starting with documentation on the popular Ethereum blockchain and the Solidity programming language used to write smart contracts. Then, you can start exploring the whole new world of Web3 tools, libraries, and APIs. You will also need a crypto wallet, such as MetaMask, to manage your Web3 assets.
As interest in the term has grown, a number of Web3 tutorials have also emerged, including on sites such as Udemy, Coursera, Web3 University, Buildspace, and through the Ethereum website itself.
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