What is Web3? The Decentralized Internet of the Future Explained

Instead of using a bank, people could pay for a good or service using a decentralized app (Dapp) made for payments. Organizations such as Starknet and zkSync offer account abstraction at the protocol level, where projects such as Web3Auth create MPC and AA-enabled key management software development kits (SDKs) for blockchain projects. While the bones of Web3 are accessible today via blockchain, NFTs, and cryptocurrency, we’re still culturally a long way from everyday Web3 access. However, many companies are launching Web3 initiatives that take certain pieces of the concept under their wing.

There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. The future is always uncertain, but the tech industry is generally on the leading edge and the buzz around crypto is unmistakable, whether it’s a bubble or not. Two of Facebook’s top engineers on its blockchain web 3.0 development and digital currency project left the company to join Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto team in October, CNBC reported. They cited the investment firm’s track record of “advancing the entire crypto ecosystem” — a more expansive mission than they had at Facebook. And last month, a vice president at Facebook’s parent company Meta left for OpenSea.

What could a Web3 version of Twitter look like?

These systems are overly complex and still do not enable true international interoperability between participants. They also require you to hand over your sensitive information and personal data in order to use them. In web3, developers don’t usually build and deploy applications that run on a single server or that store their data in a single database (usually hosted on and managed by a single cloud provider). There are even websites dedicated to keeping up with these breaches and telling you when your data has been compromised.

• As Web1 progressed, individuals and companies began using the internet increasingly for e-commerce, as well as for academic and scientific research.
• But if Web3 products and services are built on blockchains and are decentralized then you’d only have to trust the underlying algorithm to deliver that product.
• While these platforms provide access to content creation, they also take our data and use it to figure out what else we might want to consume.
• These systems are overly complex and still do not enable true international interoperability between participants.
• Web3 proponents argue that a blockchain-based internet would improve on the current internet in several ways.

There is a real potential for Web3 to change the world though, or at least to drastically change the way you use and interact with the internet. It’s impossible to say exactly what Web3 will do, or even precisely what form it will take, since it’s currently still just a set of loose concepts. The appeal of the blockchain for Web3 supporters is that it logs everything in a way that is transparent and impossible to edit or falsify.

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It’s a term used to describe immersive digital worlds, often experienced through VR instead of a computer monitor or phone screen. In this metaverse users can play games, socialize, and communicate. Another example is Helium, which is a crowdsourced wireless network that rewards users with cryptocurrency for sharing their home network connections.

These networks would rely on open protocols, allowing anyone to connect and participate, and shift power away from big companies and toward creators and users. In a previous post, Nick Sullivan described Cloudflare’s contributions to enabling privacy on the web. We have also released our data localization suite to help businesses navigate the ever evolving regulatory landscape by giving them control over where their data is stored without compromising performance and security.

What is Web3? The Decentralized Internet of the Future Explained

Web3 works by combining the decentralization of Web 1.0 with the interactiveness of Web 2.0 in a user-friendly interface. Ideally, it gives individual users more control over their online experience and increased security through blockchain technology (the decentralized transaction ledger that stores data in blocks that all users can see). Web 2.0 forces you to rely on the technology and security of big tech companies.

In the web2 world, you don’t have to be a developer to participate in the creation process. Many apps are built in a way that easily allows anyone to be a creator. Most of us have primarily experienced the web in its current form, commonly referred to as web2. Web 1.0 consisted of sites serving static content instead of dynamic HTML. Data and content were served from a static file system rather than a database, and sites didn’t have much interactivity at all. This content has been made available for informational purposes only.

Web 2.0 Monetization and Security

These central authorities have control over user data and they can manipulate the system’s rules. The data may be subject to security risks or mismanagement, potentially resulting in the loss or misuse of user information. The same cryptographic principles underpinning cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are being leveraged by applications to provide secure, cross-platform identity services.

Even worse, many platforms require you to trust them with personally identifiable information to create an account. As well as owning your data in Web3, you can own the platform as a collective, using tokens that act like shares in a company. DAOs let you coordinate decentralized ownership of a platform and make decisions about its future. Web3, short for web 3.0, is a vision of the future of the Internet in which people operate on decentralized, quasi-anonymous platforms, rather than depend on tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

How to Build on Web3

Decentralized applications also store information replicas in multiple locations and ensure data consistency throughout. Individual users can control where their data resides instead of handing it over to a centralized infrastructure. Decentralized internet users can sell their own data if they want to. But the industry could run into hurdles once regulators start paying attention in earnest. One potentially big problem is that crypto tokens — which are critical to many web3 applications — currently exist in a regulatory gray zone in the United States. Internet behemoths like Facebook and Twitter are essentially autocracies.

Companies like Stripe and Paypal have created billions of dollars of value in enabling electronic payments. If history has taught us anything, these changes will matter a lot. This is due to the heavy involvement of machine-to-machine communication and decision-making that will be needed to run many web3 applications.

Walmart and Outlier Ventures’ web3 accelerator launches with five startups

“The internet has been thriving for a long time, but the web has actually been dying,” Neuroth says. He says that content on centralized platforms is siloed from each other, which stifles the web. “[Centralized platforms] use the internet, but they’re not the web. The web is the open ecosystem.” Web3 advocates suggest cryptocurrencies will play a key role in the future of the internet. An example could be where there is a Web3 application that runs on a certain blockchain that uses a specific digital coin.