One of the buzzwords that has come out of the crypto and blockchain world is Web 3. To understand what Web 3 is, it is perhaps better to discuss the history of the World Wide Web briefly.
Web 1.0: The dawn of the World Wide Web
Web 1.0 was the original World Wide Web developed in 1989 by Tim Berners Lee, a contractor at the Swiss research agency CERN to facilitate information exchange among researchers. E-mail was already available at that time. If you were already working back then, you would remember the green-screen email terminals. The first Web 1.0 was clunky and limited to text. It had technologies like Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Universal Resource Locator (URL), and the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to send information to a receiver from a server.
All you could do with it was read news, sports info, and other info provided by the provider. It did not allow you to send or reply back with information as it was a one-way street. Marc Andreesen, a researcher at the University of Illinois, came up with the first browser, the Netscape Navigator. It has since been replaced by browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Explorer, Firefox, and others.
Web 2.0: The next millennium of web infrastructure
Eventually, Web 2.0 came up sometime in the new millennium as a host of incremental improvements like the use of client-server architecture, Java scripts, CSS, HTML 5, and PHP for the backend. The web as you know it today is mostly the most updated version of Web 2.0. You can email, surf, send encrypted secure information (HTTPS), do social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the like, and use wireless browsers on your phone. The publishing and news industries have been decimated by it, and most newspapers these days are just a shadow of their glorious past. New independent media have sprouted up. But Web 2.0 also saw the rise of mega Web companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other tech giants. When you use their services, you are the product since they can monetize how and where you browse.
Web 3.0 and its massive potential
Web 3.0 is both an offshoot and a revolt. It is an offshoot because the one remaining sector that has barely been touched by the Web is banking and finance, particularly the transfer of value (e.g. money, payments) in a peer-to-peer manner without a “trusted third party” like a bank.
Web 3.0 enables you the user to own your own data and monetize it if you want. The ownership structure is often owned by token-owning communities called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) but there are also private companies that have outsourced their operations to a Foundation. Web 3.0 seeks to decentralize ownership to a community. It also hopes to enable value and money transfer easily without the need for centralized financial giants. Applications called Decentralized Finance (DeFi) allow you to do most of the things you can do with banks, hedge funds, trading firms, and the like, but instead of human financial teams, you deal with a decentralized network of servers running the same software to form a blockchain. There are a lot of applications that are on Web 2.0 that are starting to migrate to Web 3.0, such as finance, social networks, and the like.
As with any new technology, there will always be detractors. Unfortunately for this sector, it has also had its fair share of frauds and swindlers which have affected its development and adoption because of government regulation and hesitance on the part of the majority of people.
Web 3.0 promises to be the next step in the evolution of the Web, if it can survive the numerous hurdles and challenges being thrown at it. Tech has historically had its fair share of early challenges, such as when the automobile, the web, the Internet, and other technologies came out. But if it survives, Web 3.0 promises to give us back control of our finances and our social data, and give power and ownership back to the people.