Blockchain Web (3.0)

Web 1.0 was the original Internet, lasting through the ’90s and early 2000s. The web connected people around the world—with the classic dial tone and screeching—and introduced basic versions of email and, with the launches of Friendster in 2002 and MySpace in 2003, early social media sites. You might have logged on to a BBS for the occasional live chat, but true interaction was delayed and relatively limited. (You certainly weren’t seeing every single one of your college roommate’s vacation pictures the moment he took them.) Web 2.0 is what we’re in right now, with dominant social media platforms amplifying individual voices of all kinds, and the big tech companies that run them requiring users to turn over their personal information to participate.

Yes, and it’ll be so much better. Web 3.0 is a response to the flaws of the current state of the Internet, aiming to redefine the notion of control. As Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web (and a supporter of Web 3.0), has written, “People want apps that help them do what they want and need to do—without spying on them. Apps that don’t have an ulterior motive of distracting them with propositions to buy this or that. People will pay for this kind of quality and assurance.” Right now, a few select companies—like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon—have enormous control over the data the Internet produces. As a result, they have outsize power over what features are and aren’t created. They can also profit in ways smaller companies can’t, selling ads against the data they collected and using it (and the behavior it reveals) to create proprietary AI software that could lead to an even greater concentration of power.

Blockchain. Just like with crypto, blockchain technology allows for complete transparency. It addresses the biggest issue between us and the companies providing our favorite services: trust. With Web 3.0, only the information we decide to share would be available.

Right now, tech companies collect data in walled gardens that no one else has access to. With Web 3.0, all data that anyone chooses to share would become accessible to everyone. Instead of walled gardens, we’d have vibrant public parks. This would enable other organizations to create without having to inevitably compete with the tech giants that have entrenched, all-powerful data-collection systems. This would unlock currently impossible forms of entrepreneurship—introducing countless new ideas to the world. One venture capitalist has predicted, “Web 3.0 will be a reinvention of capitalism.”