Web 3.0: the evolution | BCS – BCS

Web 3.0 is a theme, a vision, a set of ideals to reshape internet in a sense to live out its founding promise and shape its next evolution vs the centralised Web2 we have today.

It attracts idealists, technologists and entrepreneurs who all have different motivations about this space, making it quite difficult to provide a simple definition and creates some very high profile differences of opinion around Web 3.0 as well.

But, what is Web 3.0? If you have heard about Brave, Arweave, Decentraland, Axie Infinity, etc., then congratulations, you are already familiar with some initial Web 3.0 real world examples.

Its original purpose was to share knowledge among humanity with different iterations coined to represent their evolution.

Web1 - 90s Web Altavista, Yahoo, Email but mostly static web to read.

Web2 - Interactive web, search engines, ecommerce, social media, new business models and power concentrated among technology companies.

Web 3.0 - Indicates a decentralised and permissionless future for the internet.

Web 3.0 aspires to build a decentralised internet where a community of users own, control participation, switch seamlessly between services / platforms and share the rewards of using the ecosystem. The key tenet is decentralisation (trustless and permissionless) which leaves it open for all and resistant to any form of censorship. Any Web 3.0 conversation is mentioned in the same breath as crypto, which would make readers wonder whats the connection here?

To achieve the Web 3.0 vision, we rely heavily on blockchain the technology that underpins the crypto ecosystem, the ability to implement smart contracts, etc. A blockchain is a distributed ledger of records maintained by a community. Its public and immutable in the sense that history is maintained by consensus.

Smart contracts allow you to enforce agreements and terms via software code. All the developments we see in this space, like NFTs (non fungible tokens), layer 0/1/2 protocols, zero knowledge proofs, innovative tokenomics, DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations), DeFi (decentralised finance), dApps (decentralised applications), metaverse and play-to-earn all tie in to some of these aspirations around Web 3.0. Its this remaking of the internet with these innovations that broadly gets referred to as Web 3.0 but its still early days.

There are already companies, platforms, protocols and services that operate in Web 3.0 but as a new field, we need to look forward, not necessarily to how Web 3.0 works at present, but at what the future might be, such as:

There have been some legitimate criticisms of Web 3.0 about whether it will truly deliver a new world, or just shift power from incumbents to a different set of stakeholders and early movers. Would Web 3.0 investors and builders who own a large number of tokens end up driving its future evolution / governance standards to their advantage?

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Web 3.0: the evolution | BCS - BCS