Let’s Talk About Web 3.0 — Why Does it Matter?
What is the technology that benefits almost half of the world’s population for a substantial portion of their waking hours, every single day? Web 2.0.
The term Web 2.0 coined between 1999 and 2004, brought about a paradigm shift in the way we consumed the internet. It moved the world from static web pages to user-generated, interactive experiences that eventually paved the way for Instagram, Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber, among others. The driving forces behind the rise of Web 2.0 were three core layers of innovation: cloud, social, and mobile.
While Web 2.0 is still bearing fruits, we are also witnessing the initial shoots of growth erupt from the next big paradigm shift in the world of internet applications: Web 3.0. As difficult as it may seem to believe, Web 3.0 is poised to cause an even more fundamental disruption, one that in due course will leave everything hitherto in its shadow. It is a giant leap ahead to more permissionless, trustless, and open networks.
- Permissionless: Anyone, i.e., both the suppliers and users can now participate without the need for authorization from a governing body
- Trustless: The network will enable participant interaction either publicly or privately without the need for a trusted third party
- Open: The networks will be based on open-source software, which will be open and accessible to the community of developers, who can carry out executions in full view of the world
The result of these networks will be the possibility to incentivize and coordinate the long tail of work, content, data, and service providers that are stranded in the backdrops to many of the world’s pressing concerns including sustainability, finance, food, and health.
While Web 2.0 was driven by the advent of cloud, social, and mobile, Web 3.0 is built of three new avenues of technological innovation: artificial intelligence, decentralized data networks, and edge computing
Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms have progressed significantly over the past few years to be able to create useful and at times life-saving, actions and predictions. When this is layered over the new decentralized data structures by enabling access to an ocean of data, its potential applications will go far beyond the conventional targeted advertising and into climate modeling, drug design, and precision materials.
Decentralized data networks are enabling data generators to barter or sell their data without giving up their privacy or ownership control. It also eliminated the reliance on third-party agents or middlemen. The data we are talking about can include a car’s location & performance, a farmer’s cultivation data, or an individual’s health data, among others. Decentralized data networks can bring forth data generators to the emerging ‘data economy’.
The Web 2.0 wave commoditized computer hardware and was remodeled in data centers. Web 3.0, on the other hand, is pushing data centers out to the edge and in time soon, into our hands. Humungous legacy data centers are being augmented by a plethora of dynamic computing resources spread across vehicles, sensors, appliances, computers, and phones, which will produce and consume approximately 150 times more data by 2025 as opposed to 2010.
Web 3.0 will help us attain a future where distributed machines and users can have simultaneous interactions with value, data, and other counterparts via an underlying peer-to-peer network without the reliance on third parties. The resultant of Web 3.0 will be a highly composable privacy-preserving and human-centric computing fabric.
