![]() ![]() The grand vision is that participants of any network will be able to own a piece of the products and services that they use everyday. For example, ownership might be given in the form of a token provided for a service, such as providing liquidity for a trade, and that same token could also be used for governing the future changes to the network. Token-based networks built on Ethereum and other smart contract blockchains have even introduced new models of ownership that are not necessarily the same as a cooperative or shareholder equity model. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the earliest examples: in return for updating the ledger and keeping other actors honest, they receive a reward in BTC or ETH in exchange for securing the network. Ownership for Web3 means that the builders, operators, and users of a platform own a piece of what they use. In Web2, the individual user is the product. In exchange, however, they also created a silo of user data, behavior, and actions to construct a social graph that is very valuable to advertisers. Rather than maintaining your own server to display your websites, Web2 companies paid the bills. What initially started as upvotes on Digg message boards became microblogging and now over 2 billion Facebook profiles. An important shift was that unlike static, read-only versions of Web1 websites, individuals could add content to the web. Web2 describes the next evolution built using the free and open source protocols of the internet. These foundational protocols govern the flow of information and messages on the internet, and if you want to build an application or service using their rules, you don’t have to pay for access. A protocol as a standard way that multiple computers agree to talk to one another. The initial version of the Web was built on open source protocols such as TCP, IP, SMTP, and of course HTTP. When I asked my brother, a Web3 developer, how he explains Web3, his short answer is that Web1 was read-only, Web2 is read-write, Web3 is read-write-own. Web1 is read-only, Web2 is read-write, Web3 is read-write-own. It was only a matter of time until Web3 became a large enough part of the public internet discourse that the jesters came for the protocol priests. Now, Web3 is the catch-phrase for an entire investment category of a16z and other big venture capital firms, which means it is also the subject of both lengthy Twitter threads, irony, derision, and confusion. Other aspects of the decentralized web, such as decentralized storage are just becoming essential parts of the stack to persistently store files (such as IPFS and Arweave), decentralized storage (Golem, W3BCloud and others), and decentralized data (Graph Protocol). When we referred to the decentralized web, we also referred to the rest of the stack beyond decentralized money and identity. Another way to describe MetaMask is that it is a cryptographic consent manager. It is a way to generate a public-key securely on your phone or desktop, but what it enables is a new principle for interacting with the web - one where only you have access to your accounts and data and choose what to share and what to keep private. MetaMask is now the primary way in which individuals can access the Ethereum blockchain, and many more Ethereum-compatible networks. Web3 is the philosophical touchstone that guided all of ConsenSys’ early investments and projects. Since 2015, Joseph Lubin, founder and CEO of ConsenSys has been giving talks, writing, and supporting teams building Web3 and the decentralized web (as we used to describe it in our style guide). Web3 is the new trendy name for the decentralized web. Web3 is still not entirely decentralized.ġ. ![]()
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