One of the hottest buzzwords you may have heard a lot of recently is “Web3”.
First used by Gavin Wood (co-founder of Ethereum) in 2014, the term “Web3” has gained increased usage recently due to a few factors:
- The 2021 cryptocurrency rally bringing cryptocurrencies back into the spotlight
- Increased media attention around NFTs
- Emergence of proposed blockchain-based solutions for a more decentralized internet
- Potential applications of the above in the upcoming “metaverse”
The term “Web3” itself is somewhat of a misnomer and can be thought of as some clever marketing…
Because the term “Web3” implies that it is the third generation of the World Wide Web, which is more commonly known as just “the web”.
The Web At A High Level vs Web3
(Heads up: the next couple of paragraphs might be a little tech-heavy, but bear with me.)
In essence, the web can be thought of as a bunch of pages and other resources that are scattered on servers all over the world. You can access them using “URLs” and pages have the ability to link to each other using “hyperlinks”. These hyperlinks create paths from one page to another that come together like a spider’s web – from which its name comes.
“Web3” on the other hand is not really focused on creating a similar web of hyperlinked resources, but instead on solving problems around asset ownership – both physical and digital.
The web up until now runs on a client/server model over the “http/https” protocol, whereas “Web3” as it is proposed runs on a decentralized model over blockchain-based protocols.
So Web3 is not really an evolution of the web, but a proposed alternative to it.
Introducing Web 3.0
However, before “Web3” there was already a vision emerging for a true “third-generation” of the web that was named “Web 3.0”.
A big component of that Web 3.0 vision is something called the “semantic web”, proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the very inventor of the World Wide Web himself.
Before diving further into this, let’s break review how the web evolved (note that much of this is subjective and there is much debate around these definitions):
- Web 1.0: from 1991 to the early 2000’s. During this time, web pages were mostly static and content leaned towards being self-hosted. Users generally tended to be consumers of content rather than producers.
- Web 2.0: from the early 2000s onwards. During this time, web pages become more dynamic and their use of databases powering them becomes common. We also see the rise of blogging and other platforms making it easier for users to produce and distribute their own content. Social media and other “user-generated content” channels rise to prominence. Technically, we see the rise of Web APIs, cloud computing, and increasingly rich user experiences from approaches like AJAX and single-page applications, to name a few.
Web 3.0’s Semantic Web
Web 3.0, is meant to be the continuation of the web’s evolution from Web 2.0. As mentioned, a big component of that is the semantic web. The aim of the semantic web is to make resources that we can access over the web to be more “machine-readable”.
For example, say you are reading a Wikipedia article and inside that document is a person’s name e.g. “Abraham Lincoln”. While we humans can make sense of the context of the text and realize that “Abraham Lincoln” is a person’s name, machines aren’t as easily able to do this out of the gate. But if we were to add some information to that page that a machine can read to know that “Abraham Lincoln” is a person’s name, then they can perform richer tasks without human intervention or needing machine learning models.
Takeaways
While (rightly or wrongly) there is a lot of hype around Web3 right now, it’s important to understand that it is not in fact a true next iteration of the World Wide Web, which is what the vision of Web 3.0 is meant to be.
Comparing between them, some key differences to note:
Distribution Model
Web3: Decentralized, peer-to-peer
Web 3.0: Client/server
Underlying Protocols
Web3: Blockchain-based
Web 3.0: http/https
Relation To The World Wide Web
Web3: Alternative to the World Wide Web
Web 3.0: Continuation of the World Wide Web
Philosophy
Web3: Removing intermediaries – examples are directly connecting content creators and content consumers, eliminating third parties in transactions, etc
Web 3.0: Continuing the evolution of the web – for example evolving to a semantic web to make web content more machine-readable