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Blockchain technology enables the decentralization of the Internet, thus giving way to Web3 and giving ownership back to its users.
What is Web3 and how Blockchain enables it? A new internet where the decentralization of Web 1.0 and the advanced technology of Web2 are mixed. Web3 promises to return digital sovereignty to the user thanks to the decentralizing power of Blockchain, the technology that was born with the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Many tools that people are still wary of, such as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), cryptocurrencies, and Decentralized Applications (dApps), are forming the basis of the new Internet.
What is the Web3 Blockchain
Since its beginnings in the 1990s, the Web has continued to evolve. Developers based Web1 on open, decentralized, and community-governed protocols. It was a read-only web, where the user could not interact with the page’s content at any time. As the number of users increased, the problems with this web version grew.
Web2 was born to overcome these limitations. It is the Web we use today, and its main advantage over the previous one is its high capacity for interaction. The Social Web is another name for Web2. Its users group into communities and various apps, including social networks and forums. These apps encourage collaboration and information exchange. Centralized services are at the heart of The performance of the Social Web and are administered by huge businesses. Google, Amazon, and Facebook have almost complete control of Web2.
The arrival of Web3
As was the case with the birth of Web2, Web3 promises to solve the problems of its previous versions. Web3 is also known as the Semantic Web since it can offer a more personalized interface by facilitating the interpretation of user metadata. Thanks to Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. However, the technology that allows us to go much further is Blockchain. Blockchains promise to return privacy and digital identity to the user while enabling new levels of interaction thanks to NFTs and dApps. Blockchain technology brings together the best of Web1 and Web2 in Web3.
The role of NFTs
To understand the role that NFTs can play in Web3, it is necessary first to assimilate their full potential. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique assets used to represent a physical or digital asset on Blockchain digitally. Beyond their applications in the art world, NFTs make it possible to connect the Internet to the real world without intermediaries economically.
NFTs offer users the ability to own objects on the Internet. These objects can be pictures, music, text, rights, passwords, and anything else you can own. The critical feature of NFTs is that they allow owners to prove ownership. Therefore, just as the Internet democratized access to information, NFTs are already democratizing money exchange. They are the key to moving digital property out of the hands of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA group) and into the hands of users.
Example: TIME magazine
An example of how Web3 may work in the future is the collection of 4,676 subscriptions in the form of NFTs launched by TIME magazine last September. In Web2, to subscribe to the magazine and read its website, you must fill in a form in which you have to give some details, including your banking information. Once you pay the subscription, you can access the site with a username and password. If you have paid for an annual subscription, but halfway through the year, you get tired of its contents and stop reading the publication, no one will give you back the money you paid.
Thanks to blockchain technology, instead of filling out a form to give all your data, you must buy the subscription in NFT format from a marketplace of NFTs. In this case, from OpenSea. Once you acquire the NFT, it is stored in our cryptocurrency and registered in the Blockchain. The NFT is ours and, therefore, the underlying subscription. Our cryptocurrency software (Metamask, for example) connects automatically through a browser extension, having all the magazine articles at our disposal to read TIME magazine articles.
If they change their editorial chief in the middle of the year and you no longer like the articles, you can sell your purchased subscription on secondary markets. Likewise, if it turns out that the newspaper, magazine, or TV is much more successful with the new editor-in-chief, the NFT subscription could be revalued, and you could make money on it. You can also apply the idea of subscriptions with NFTs to Netflix or any other streaming platform. Moreover, all these transactions are anonymous; you do not have to provide personal data. Users get done with everything through an anonymous crypto-wallet on Ethereum.
Decentralized Applications (dApps)
Another critical aspect of Blockchain’s relationship with Web3 is decentralized applications (dApps). The dApps work through smart contracts, which enable new levels of interaction without intermediaries by helping the autonomous execution of programs if a set of conditions become true. An excellent example of a dApp is a decentralized exchange (DEX).
DEXs are cryptocurrency exchange platforms without intermediaries that operate using smart contracts. DEXs operate like traditional exchanges, but a central figure does not control the funds. They are in the hands of the user at all times. In other words, a decentralized exchange facilitates trading between users through Smart Contracts but does not take control of the cryptocurrencies. Enting any private information in these exchanges is unnecessary, so they operate outside the law. Centralized exchanges such as Coinbase or Binance require a photo of an identity document to control user balances. You only need one thing in decentralized exchanges a crypto-wallet.
Although these exchanges need some regulation, they are crucial in building a decentralized Web3. Websites will then shift the power from a few to the users’ hands. In the constant evolution of the technological world, the idea of web 3.0 refers to a web capable of interpreting and interconnecting a more significant number of data, allowing an increase in interactivity and meaning.
Characteristics of Web 3
The situation that favors the emergence of this new web stage is the need for a more “intelligent” Internet in which users can make searches closer to the natural language. The information that the search yields will be more relevant thanks to the rules associated with the meaning of web content.
1 Recording of user history:
- Frequency of navigation.
- Web visits.
- Type of searches.
- Activities performed.
- Online purchases made.
2 Websites will analyze data and user behavior.
3 Personalization of the Web depends on each user.
4 Development of 3.0 technology with a language, intelligent programs, artificial intelligence assistance, and semantics
- RDF: tools such as RDF Schema and OWL allow adding meaning to pages and is one of the essential technologies of the Semantic Web.
- Ontologies: Ontology in computer science attempts to formulate a comprehensive and rigorous conceptual scheme within a domain to facilitate communication and information sharing between different systems.
- AI: adds to this set of technologies the part of computational processing to deduce new knowledge from different knowledge sources. AI inputs the rules and relationships between concepts and objects and deduces new truths, growing the knowledge base.
- Com: The site’s goal is ambitious, and it hopes to be the largest free global database in the world.
5 Web Personalization is offered, depending on each user.
6 Interoperability between platforms and social networks.
7 Geolocation: to know where users are.
8 Intelligent searches: thousands of entries will no longer appear when searching. The network will know each person and will adapt to them.