Reading Room
06.10.2017

What is Web3?

#web3

The Web3 term was suggested in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood as a more effective alternative to Tim Bernays-Lee’s (one of the creators of the “World Wide Web”) Internet evolution.

Gavin and his allies have a number of critical questions about the current structure of the global network that none of the current leaders offer solutions to, and they are not even on their current agenda. The concern boils down to over-centralization and censorship of the current structure of the Internet.

Gavin and the Web3 Foundation he founded formulated three key features of the new technological order and future web3:

  1. Users own their own data;
  2. All transactions must be uncensorable and secure;
  3. Exchange of data and values must be decentralized.

Blockchain technology should ensure the technical operation of the new Internet.

In fact, the continued hype around web3 started after the cryptocommunity agreed that an internet built on the above principles could challenge FAANG and capture their capitalization.

The problem is the technical infrastructure is not ready for this.

Despite the fact that Bitcoin has been working consistently for more than 8 years, it has very limited functionality. Satoshi used cryptography to solve a very primitive problem — to determine and lock the order of events in a reliable and censorproof way. For a long time this primitive has been associated with the word “blockchain”.

Only in 2015 Ethereum implemented the idea that the blockchain is also a decentralized consensus computer. Which is capable of performing complex computational tasks.

Since then, there has been a debate about what the architecture of the new Internet, built on such distributed computers, would look like.

For now, the community has reached the following consensus.

The technology stack must be abstractly divided into several layers, each providing different functionality:
Layer 0 (L0): Basic protocols for interacting through p2p networks and working between such networks (Polkadot, Cosmos).
L1: Transaction protocols (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin).
L2: Support, maintenance and scaling of L1 protocols (high-speed transaction processing, heavy computing, oracles, etc.).
L3: APIs and libraries to make it easier for developers to interact with previous layers.
L4: Browser for web3 users.

We are watching dozens and hundreds of projects developing new protocols on each of these layers. The goal of all of them is to take their technological place in the future of the Internet. And then, will come products for the mass user. And all of them together will imminently defeat the current corporations. Amen.