Introduction

General

There’s a lot of buzz around the Web 3.0 movement and the changes it will bring to the industry, but few people actually know why it began and what it will bring. To understand this, let’s take a look back at its predecessors - Web 1.0 and 2.0.

Web 1.0 or ‘World Wide Web’ as it was known, was just a set of static websites with lots of information and no interactive content. Slow dial-up connections for chat rooms and MSN messenger, AltaVista and Ask Jeeves. Then came 2.0. Faster internet speeds paved the way for interactive content. The web wasn’t about observing anymore, it was about participating. New platforms provided users with faster, more reliable, and feature-rich services. The global sharing of information spawned the age of ‘Social Media’. Youtube, Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook gave voices to the voiceless and a means for like-minded communities to thrive.

With the vast increase in internet users and volume of data floating around, big digital corporations soon realized how valuable of an asset personal information is. So began the mass stockpiling of data in centralized servers, with Amazon, Facebook and Twitter the biggest custodians. People sacrificed privacy for the convenience of these services; whether they knew it or not, their identities, browsing habits, searches and online shopping information was sold to the highest bidder.

While the Web 2.0 democratized many power structures and created new opportunities, the economic engine is largely privatized and monopolized. Almost all online services are hosted on hardware owned by the “big three” cloud providers, which consist of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google. Facebook now boasts 2.9 billion users worldwide. Uber and AirBnB have created private networks for public infrastructure which they dominate.

The Web 3.0 is the antithesis of this, it’s about multiple profit centers sharing value across an open network. The primary purpose of the Web 3.0 movement isn’t focused on expanding the functionality of the internet. Instead, Web 3.0 is focused on restructuring the way in which the internet is accessed and interacted with. We now have the development of what is described as a human-centred internet.

The vision of a fairer and more transparent web dates back to around 2006, but the tools and technologies weren’t available. However, since Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper in 2008 and the resultant advances in blockchain technology for peer-to-peer digital storage, the wheels have been set in motion for Web 3.0. Decentralisation was the idea; blockchain was the means.

The Web 3.0 internet can fight back against the age of surveillance capitalism we find ourselves in. It is anti-monopoly, interoperable, pro-privacy, and collaborative. The era where crypto-based phones, VPN’s, decentralised storage and cryptocurrency wallets are widespread may not be as far away as you might think. A future without the need for network and cellular providers that suspend or surveil our information is coming.

Web 3.0 technology for the new age of social

Decentralisation

Blockchain technology has enabled a shift in the balance of power away from the large governing platforms and back into the hands of the community. It has enabled distributed and peer-to-peer data storage and sharing. This allows for better control, privacy and encryption when sharing data online.

Decentralised storage of data makes it much more secure and protects it from hacking. This makes large data breaches impossible and provides more reassurance to users that their personal information remains private and is not being manipulated to target them in any way.

Cryptocurrency

The rise of cryptocurrency has wrestled central financial control away from banking systems and enabled decentralised finance. The main benefits of this are that it enables peer-to-peer transactions, there is no closed time for trading/transacting and it is governed by smart contracts for fast, accurate, secure and transparent transfers.

It has also led to the launching of many token economies as a means of empowering community ecosystems and enabling them to earn financial rewards for their contributions. This simply involves linking your cryptocurrency wallet to the partnering blockchain of the platform. This allows any cryptocurrency rewards or digital assets to be stored securely in your personal wallet and available to exchange or transact as you please.

Open-source protocols

Transparency is an important feature of Web 3.0 technology. We’re moving to the age of smart contracts and open-source algorithms. Open-source means the code a software is run on is available to view and inspect giving reassurance to the user.

Smart contracts are programs stored on a blockchain that are used to automate the execution of an agreement so that all participants can be immediately certain of the outcome, without any intermediary’s involvement or time loss. Similarly, algorithms used to fuel recommendation engines work in a similar way. It is becoming increasingly popular for code to be open-source and transparent after the last decade of how social networks manipulated its users.