Web3: the web to come

Those of us who have been doing this for a few years now have seen an evolution from the primitive model of the web to what it has become today. We moved from web 1.0 to the much-talked-about web 2.0, changing along the way. From blogs to the semantic web and from there to social networks…

 

And here we have Web 3, which is going to impose itself growing from a technological change: the blockchain, which is also behind the very famous cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (a payment method present even in some eCommerce).

Before developing what this new standard is, it is important to make a brief comment on what it is not.

 

It is a bit confusing because of the similarity of the denominations and many people believe that Web3 (which we could call Web 3.0) is directly the same as the so-called World Wide Web Consortium or W3C. Although the latter is actually a committee that establishes the technologies to be implemented in the development of the Internet by the community.

 

As you can see, it could be tangentially related, but it is not the same thing at all.

As we said, at the beginning the web was composed only of pages with their corresponding domains related to each other by links. Any person "owned" his or her own piece of the Internet by hosting his or her content on it, which was accessed by directly entering the URL (web address) in the browser bar.

From there we moved on to a certain paradigm shift. Browsers became more sophisticated and began to index the available content, integrating the function of search engines: they were no longer just for browsing the Internet, but were also useful to help us find the content we were searching for. The content became centralized in one place (mainly Google) whose rules ended up determining the volume of its traffic (if SEO was done, of course).

Then social networks arrived and became closed ecosystems. They had (and still have) no other raison d'être than to offer a platform for user-generated content, and yet the content belongs to the social network because it was generated there, and not to the user. They are still used to drive traffic to external sites, but they have become more and more self-sufficient. To the point that a company could be viable using its social profiles as an exclusive channel.

The main difference with the previous model is that here we become content generators for a few third parties who manage it, benefiting from our content -which we do not own- in the form of advertising and other services.  

Meanwhile, the real Web3 revolution is already on the horizon, and it is betting on decentralizing content ownership, taking Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and, to some extent, Google out of the equation, despite the fact that the networks are quite opaque for the search engine.

 

It might seem like a return to the initial model, but it is not thanks to blockchain technology. This allows the system to carry out two important things that were unthinkable until now: to establish the exclusive ownership of a digital asset with absolute security and, as a consequence of this unique ownership, it also makes the principle of scarcity apply, so that these digital properties have an effective economic value.

It really has a great technical complexity, so we will try to explain it in a simple way even if it is not in all the depth that this topic gives of itself.

 

As we say, we start from blockchain technology and, as its name suggests, it is a chain of independent blocks that are also encrypted to make them more secure.

 

Each of these blocks contains information that can be an economic transaction or a digitized asset and that, before entering the chain and relating to the previous block, has to be validated by other users present on the network.

 

In other words: thanks to blockchain we can define the ownership of any content. What is more, it does not necessarily have to be digital, because thanks to those tokens we mentioned, total or partial ownership of any content or intellectual property on it can be granted, such as the rights to an audiovisual work. This is done by virtue of the so-called smart contracts in Web jargon3.

You may remember a post in this blog talking about what are the NFTs or Non Fungible Tokens are, if you have not read it yet we invite you to do it to deepen in the subject.

 

Thanks to this validation, which must be done through the network of users, we ensure that we have an inviolable property title because, even if one of these is modified by someone other than the owner, it would be impossible to alter all the copies that are distributed over the network. This is why we speak of decentralization: because there is no longer a single manager but a network of independent nodes.

This is a further-reaching change than it seems, and it will be largely transparent to the user. But Web3 will bring added transparency and security to the entire e-commerce ecosystem.

 

Transparency lies in the fact that the terms of smart contracts cannot be altered. Their conditions can be automated and fulfilled without human intervention, and we do not depend on any body to arbitrate hypothetical disputes. Everything is very clear.