By Huma Arshad

The world is rapidly moving from community focus (web 2.0 ) to individual focus (Web 3.0 ). Think about how the internet affects your life daily. Consider how society has changed as a result of the internet. Social media platforms, Mobile apps, and now the internet is going through another paradigm shift. The web has evolved a lot over the years, and its applications of it today are almost unrecognizable from its early days. The evolution of the web is often partitioned into three separate stages: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0.

If we see in detail the difference between Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0, we got to know that Web 1.0 was the first iteration of the web. Most participants were consumers of content, and the creators were typically developers who build websites that contained information served up mainly in text or image format. Web 1.0 lasted approximately from 1991 to 2004.

Web 2.0 refers to worldwide websites which highlight user-generated content, usability, and interoperability for end users. Web 2.0 is also called the participative social web. It does not refer to a modification to any technical specification, but to modify the way Web pages are designed and used. The social Web contains several online tools and platforms where people share their perspectives, opinions, thoughts, and experiences. Web 2.0 applications tend to interact much more with the end-user. As such, the end-user is not only a user of the application but also a participant, examples are blogging, podcasting, social media, social networking.

Web 3.0 is the third generation of the Internet—a global network that permits intelligent interactions between all its users and devices. Web 3.0 represents a paradigm shift for the internet — towards a decentralized, user-focused, and immersive online experience.Web3.0 enhances the internet as we know it today with a few other added characteristics. For example, it is verifiable, trustless, self-governing, permissionless, distributed, and robust. In Web 3.0 developers do not usually build and deploy applications that run on a single server to store their data in a single database usually hosted on and managed by a single cloud provider. Web 3.0 is being deliberately designed to address the prevalent, potentially problematic issues inherent in today’s internet ecosystem. However, there is no centralized authority overseeing the development of this new and open internet. Instead, progress is being made through the efforts of a loosely aligned assortment of private businesses, non-profit organizations, and individuals.

While the various teams and independent developers working on Web 3.0 features vary in strategy and approach, most attempts to create working frameworks or applications for the new internet center on the use of blockchain, whose Distributed Ledger Technology effectively resolves many of the underlying issues inherent in Web 2.0 and can be deployed in a way that augments and connects other cutting-edge technologies. More specifically, blockchain is essential to the formation of Web 3.0 because it is open. Ever since the concept of blockchain was introduced in Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper, the technology has been defined by a collaborative, open-source ethos that converts the concepts of accessibility, equitability, and community governance into actual web services and protocols. And, while there may be specific use cases for private blockchains, most blockchain proponents believe that the technology’s true potential lies in ubiquitous public blockchains that feature transparent transactions and data records. Secondly, it is trustless. In addition to being transparent, blockchain records are also censorship-resistant and immutable. The rules governing how transactions are executed and stored on a blockchain ledger are dictated by smart contracts and other hard-coded protocols, meaning that users can rely on the validity of the network’s performance or output without the need to trust anyone else on the network. As a result, blockchain technology mitigates the risks of operational opacity, selectively enforced rules, and other forms of obfuscation or bias, and provides a decentralized means of securing transactions and data.

Several promising blockchain projects are working towards the establishment of Web 3.0, with Ethereum currently leading the pack in terms of user adoption and breadth of scope. However, since the goal of Web 3.0 is to enable a more decentralized, collaborative internet, the various blockchain projects working to create Web 3.0 should be viewed as a collective endeavor rather than a race in which only one winner will be crowned.

“It could enable an open and interoperable new generation of the web—a Web 3.0 era that secures the privacy and property rights of individuals while ensuring secure and trustworthy interactions and transactions between the human, machine, and virtual economies. This future adds a new dimension to the web. It enables —The Spatial Web.”

― Gabriel Rene, The Spatial Web, How Web 3.0 Will Connect Humans, Machines, and AI to Transform the World