The Decentralized Internet of the Future – the next iteration of ‘World Wide Web – WWW,’ is on the rise and brings the blockchain revolution with it.

Imagine a next-gen internet that accurately interprets your inputs but actually understands everything you convey either through text, voice or any other media, where all the content that we consume is tailored and customized than ever before. We are at the tipping point of a new era in the Web’s evolutions. In 2014 Gavin Wood, co-creator of the Ethereum blockchain, predicted the internet of the future to be centred on — unsurprisingly — blockchain technology.

The Evolution of Web 3.0: Web 3.0 centres on the idea that there was already a significant shift in how we use the internet, moving us from Web 1.0 (yesterday’s internet) to Web 2.0 (today’s internet), so it helps define those generations. Web 3.0, also known as Web 3, is a new iteration of WWW-based blockchain technology that incorporates decentralization and token-based economics. Web 3.0 was originally called the ‘Semantic Web’ by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and aimed to be a more intelligent, autonomous, and open internet. The proliferation of blockchain and NFTs is decentralizing the Web, allowing creators to monetize their connections without depending on ‘Big-Tech’ social media platforms. To understand what Web 3.0 means, let us know about its predecessors:

  1. Web 1.0 (1989 – 2005): Web 1.0 is also called ‘Static Web,’ built on decentralized and community-governed protocols, and the user demographic was content, primarily consumers rather than content creators. It was mostly a bunch of static pages read-only mode, and there wasn’t any logging in or interacting with posts or viewing analytics, and it wasn’t even profitable by ads. Green shoots of E-commerce; Desktop browser access, and Dedicated Infrastructure.
  2. Web 2.0 (2005 – Present): The rise of Web 2.0 was primarily driven by three core layers of innovation: mobile, social and cloud. With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, mobile internet access drastically broadened both the user-base and the usage of the Web: we moved from dialling up to the internet a few hours a day at home at our desktops to an “always connected” state — the web browser, mobile apps and personal notifications were now in everyone’s pocket. Until Friendster, MySpace and then Facebook in 2004, the Internet was predominantly dark and anonymous. However, these social networks coaxed users into good behaviour and content generation, including recommendations and referrals: from persuading us to share photos online with specific friend groups; to entrusting unknown travellers with our homes on AirBnB; and even getting into a stranger’s car with Uber. Cloud commoditized the production and maintenance of internet pages & applications: new cloud providers aggregated and refined mass-produced personal computer hardware within numerous, vast data centres worldwide. Companies could shift from buying and maintaining their own expensive and dedicated infrastructure upfront to renting storage, compute power and management tools on the go. Millions of entrepreneurial experiments could benefit from low-cost resources that scaled as their businesses grew. ‘Social’ networks, Mobile-first always on Cloud-driven computing.

Note: The process goes something like this – The company launches an App; It onboards as many users as possible, monetizing its user base through ads and selling the data. More data leads to more personalized ads. This leads to more clicks and ultimately more ad revenue. The exploitation and centralization of user data is core to how the ‘Web’ as we know and use it today is engineered to function.

  1. Web 3.0 (Yet to come): Web 3.0 is built mainly on three new layers of technological innovation: edge computing, decentralized data networks and artificial intelligence. Web 3.0 spreads the ‘Data centre’ out to the Edge and often right into our hands. Large legacy data centres are being supplemented by many powerful computing resources spread across computers, appliances, sensors, phones, and vehicles, which are forecast to produce and consume 160 (!) times more data in 2025 than in 2010.
  • Decentralized data networks are making it possible for these data generators (from an individual’s health data to a farmer’s crop data or performance data & a car’s location ) to sell or barter their data without losing ownership control, giving up privacy or reliance on third-party intermediaries. However, decentralized data networks can bring the entire long-tail of data generators into the emerging ‘data economy’.
  • Artificial intelligence & Machine learning algorithms have become powerful enough to create functional, sometimes life-saving, predictions and actions. When layered on top of new decentralized data structures giving access to a wealth of data that would be the envy of today’s tech giants, the potential applications go far beyond targeted advertising into areas like precision materials, drug design and climate modelling.

Web 3.0 is a leap forward to open, trustless and permissionless networks.

  • ‘Open‘ is built from open-source software developed by an open and accessible community of developers and executed in full view of the world.
  • ‘Trustless‘ in which the network itself allows participants to interact publicly or privately without a trusted third party.
  • ‘Permissionless‘ in which anyone, both users and suppliers, can participate without authorization from a governing body.

With Web 3.0, men, women, machines & businesses will be able to trade value information & work with global counterparties they do not know or yet explicitly trust without an intermediary. The most critical evolution enabled by Web3.0 is the minimization of the trust required for coordination on a global scale. This marks a move towards trusting all network constituents implicitly rather than relying on each individual explicitly and seeking to achieve trust extrinsically.

Web 3.0 will fundamentally expand the scope and scale of the machine and human interactions far beyond what we can imagine today. These interactions, ranging from richer information flows to trusted data transfers to seamless payments, will become possible with a vastly increased range of potential counterparties. Moreover, web 3.0 will enable us to interact with any individual or machine in the world without having to pass through fee-based intermediaries. This shift will enable a whole new wave of previously unimaginable businesses and business models: from global co-operatives to decentralized autonomous organizations and self-sovereign data marketplaces.

Why does this matter?:

  • Societies could become more efficient by reducing rent-seeking third parties, disintermediating industries and returning this value back directly to its suppliers and users in a network.
  • Organizations can be intrinsically more resilient to change through their new mesh of more adaptable peer-to-peer communication and governance ties between participants.
  • Humans, machines and enterprises can share more data with more privacy & security assurances.
  • We can future-proof entrepreneurial & investment activities by virtually eradicating the platform dependency risks we observe today.
  • We can now own our data and digital footprints using the provable digital scarcity of data and tokenized digital assets.
  • Through ‘mutual modern’ ownership and governance of these new decentralized systems of sophisticated intelligence and dynamic economic incentives, network participants can collaborate to solve previously intractable or ‘thinly spread’ problems.

In Web 3.0, social media platforms, marketplaces and search engines, etc., will be built on the blockchain and facilitated by cryptocurrencies which gave rise to novel developments like uncensorable content and more inclusive payment services. Cryptocurrencies that are associated with Web 3.0 are known as Web 3.0 cryptocurrencies or Web 3.0 tokens. Ideally, Web 3.0 aims to give users more control over their digital content with the help of decentralized infrastructure. It is shifting the dependency of transactions and permissions away from the central authority. This is promising for the creator economy, where users can be rewarded financially when they own or bring digital data and value to the online community. However, for Web 3.0 to take off, it has to be powered by networks offering scalability, security, and decentralization. Furthermore, because Web 3.0 invites more user interaction and applications, scalability is critical in supporting the future Web 3.0’s apps and user operations.

To summarise, The forthcoming wave of Web 3.0 goes far beyond the initial use-case of cryptocurrencies. Web 3.0 will cryptographically connect data from individuals, machines and corporations with efficient machine learning algorithms. Leading the rise of fundamentally new markets and associated business models. In my next article, I will discuss the ‘Scalability dilemma, Security and Privacy issues and other the challenges.’