Beginners Guide to Blockchain Part VIII: What is Web 3.0?
Let’s get talking about Web 3.0 — However, if you’re diving deep into de “crypto” rabbit hole like I think you are, you might find the previous articles of our “Beginners Guide to Blockchain” useful for your journey, here they are:
- What is Bitcoin?
- What is Blockchain?
- What is Ethereum?
- What is DeFi?
- What is an NFT?
- What is a DAO?
- What is an Altcoin? What is an ICO?
Ok, with that said — Let’s get to work:
What is Web 3.0?
Web3 (also known as Web 3.0 and sometimes stylized as web3) is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web based on blockchains, which incorporates concepts including decentralization and token-based economics.
Da daaah! That’s it. Wait. No, not really, that explanation is kind of plain so let’s give you a little bit more context.
The different stages of the Internet have been catalogued into the following 3 versions of the web:
What is Web 1.0?
Web 1.0 is the very first version of the World Wide Web that we got to experience, the actual term Web 1.0 was coined in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and it is a stage of the web known by one main characteristic:
The only thing you could do with it was consuming content.
No optins required, not a lot of easy to access content creation platforms for the every day user, on social media, pretty much just plain white background websites with information you could consume.
What is Web 2.0?
Then technology kept evolving and we started getting better at coding, at processing speeds, we got faster internet connections and smarter developers and it was just around 1999 when the name Web 2.0 started being used.
What was the main difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0? That in Web 2.0 the users could now interact, create content, argue, connect and comment. The web experience now became interactive.
It is in Web 2.0 where we got all the apps you love, hate and use everyday; Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. The whole business model of “I’ll give you the app for free but your data becomes the product I sell to my advertisers” was born right here in Web 2.0
Now, what is Web 3.0 really?
Web 3.0 is, in my opinion a response to the invasiveness and intensity of Web 2.0. The main ideal behind web 3.0 is using blockchain technology to get decentralization, to take power away from big tech and bring “the power back to the people”.
Through dapps (decentralized applications) built on Ethereum and other chains, Web 3.0 envisions a future where the users of this Web 3.0 dapps will also be the owners of the dapps or at least earn money from using and promoting this dapps themselves. You can read more about Ethereum and Dapps here.
“Now Chris, is Web 3.0 really here now?”
The answer is yes and now. We already have a lot of Dapps in existence (you can research some of them here) but most are still early stage and a lot of them have grown around the financial sector.
What we will soon experience, if things go right, is a boom of Dapps (Web 3.0 applications) in a lot of different sectors: ecommerce, food, retail, hotels, transportation and more…
And if you ask me — A web 3.0 future is very exciting.
Did you like this article? Follow me on twitter, leave me a comment and let me know you’re alive.
- Chris Pace.
