What is Web 3? And its evolution?

30 Sep

What is Web 3? And its evolution?

The entire lineage or evolution of Web can be broken down to 3 stages. Starting from the fundamental Web 1, now we can enjoy the benefits that Web 3, the latest version, offers. Read on to keep yourself well-informed about what is Web 3 and its features.

Table of Contents hide

1) The Evolution Of Web
2) What is Web 3’s Technology Stack
3) Top 10 Web3-Related Developer Jobs To Apply For
4) Related posts

The Evolution Of Web

The web has undergone radical changes since the beginning and its evolution can be classified into 3 progressive phases: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0.

What Is Web 1

The first iteration, Web 1 was mainly for consumers of content which primarily involved text or image format. Web 1 lasted around 13 years, from 1991 to 2004.

Web 1 comprises of websites holding static content instead of dynamic HTML. In addition, data and content were hosted from a static file and there was no interactivity at all. As a result, most people considered Web 1 a read-only system.

What Is Web 2

While Web 1 was rather basic, Web 2 can be considered a more interactive and socially-inclined web. Most of us have experienced Web 2 in its current form. We do not have to be a developer to create something on Web 2 – There are easy ways for virtually anyone to build applications, sites and contents. For instance, it is very easy now to share your thoughts with the world, upload a video for millions to see and interact with your online assets.

Thanks to its simplicity, an increasing number of people around the world are becoming creators.

What Is Web 3

In order to answer the question “What is Web 3?”, there are a few core differences to be pointed out between Web 2 and Web 3. The latter improves the Internet with

Web3 enhances the internet as we know it today with a few other added characteristics. Overall, Web 3 is:

Trustless
Self-governing
Verifiable
Stateful
Allowing Native built-in payments
Permissionless
Distributed and robust

In Web 3’s domain, it is not recommended to build and implement applications that run on a 1 server or store data in a single database, both of which are often hosted and managed by a single cloud service provider.

Rather, Web 3 applications run on blockchains, decentralized networks of many peer-to-peer nodes (servers). Also, they can run on a crypto-economic protocol. These apps are often referred to as dapps, decentralized apps. To ensure a stable and secure decentralized network, network participants are encouraged to provide the highest quality services to anyone using the service via competition.

Cryptocurrency is an important feature when it comes to Web 3. It provides a financial incentive (tokens) for anyone participating in creating, governing, contributing to, or improving one of the projects.

Many web infrastructure protocols such as Filecoin, Livepeer, Arweave, and The Graph have issued utility tokens that power the protocols themselves. These tokens, at the same time, reward their participants. Even native blockchain protocols like Ethereum operate in this manner.

Web 3 also offers a variety of different services like compute, storage, bandwidth, identity, hosting, and other web services that were commonly provided by cloud providers.

What is Web 3’s Technology Stack

What is Web 3’s technology stack? It comprises 4 levels from the root layers to protocol-extensible ones. As a result, it offers maximum comfort and innovation.

L4: Protocol-extensible user-interface cradle/ Browser

The top level of the stack includes the ability for the average user to interact with one or more blockchains.

In addition, protocol-extensible user-interface cradle /browser is a program for the user to interact directly with the blockchain without technical implementation detail requirements. Typical examples would include Status, MetaMask, or MyCrypto.

L3: Protocol-Extensible Developer Apis & Languages

This is the layer of human-interactive languages and libraries that allow developers to create programs and applications. There are a host of languages used to develop such as Solidity and Vyper (Ethereum), Plutus (Cardano), and Rust (Substrate). Moreover, it is easier to develop applications interacting with a blockchain thanks to available frameworks, such as ethers.js, web3.js, and oo7.js.

L2: Second layer protocols

This layer improves the functionalities of the first layer, such as increased scaling, encrypted messaging, and distributed computing.

State channels

A way for blockchains to increase scalability by allowing nodes to communicate with each other off-chain, by opening channels on the main chain, and by writing only initial and final results. Cases in point are Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and Ethereum’s Raiden Network.

Plasma protocols

Plasma is another way of increasing scalability by building a system of blockchains. The main chain acts as the root, and the branch blockchains are limited from demanding resources from higher-level chains. Examples include Loom’s PlasmaChain and OmigeGO Plasma.

Encrypted storage

This mathematically encrypts and decrypts data in both forms: at-rest (stored on a specific computer) and in-motion (being transferred from one computer to another).

Heavy Computation

Heavy computation allows computation to be spread among many computers and proves that the computations are conducted correctly. Examples include Golem and TrueBit on Ethereum.

Distributed secret management

This allows information to be accessed only by authorized parties, including complex situations such as “decrypting this information requires all six parties to be present. Examples include Parity Secret Store.

Oracles

Oracles is a means to input off-chain data like stock prices onto a blockchain, for smart contracts.

L1: First Layer Protocols

This layer provides the ability to distribute and interact with data.

Zero/low trust interaction protocols (Bitcoin, Ethereum, parachains)

Zero/low trust interaction protocols depicts how different nodes interact with each other and the trust computation and information coming from each. Most cryptocurrencies meet the definition of a Zero/low trust interaction protocol.

Data distribution protocols

These protocols show how data is distributed and communicated between nodes in a decentralized system. Typical instances are IPFS, Swarm and BigchainDB.

Transient data pub/sub messaging

This demonstrates how the data not meant to be permanently stored is conducted and how nodes are aware of it. Examples are Whisper and Matrix.

L0: Root Level Layers

This is the core level of the Web 3 technology stack.

Zero/low trust meta protocols (Polkadot)

Zero/low trust interaction platforms form a zero/low trust interaction protocol to allow all members to share security access with each other. Polkadot is an example of this.

Peer-to-peer (p2p) internet overlay protocols

This is a networking suite enabling internal nodes to communicate in a decentralized way.

Platform neutral language

It is a means to execute the same program on different physical platforms (architectures, OSes, etc.). Examples can be EVM (Ethereum), UTXOs (Bitcoin), and Wasm (Polkadot).

That wraps up the core data to answer the question what is Web 3. If you are in need of more information about job opportunities related, keep on reading.

Top 10 Web3-Related Developer Jobs To Apply For

A Web3 developer should be familiar with the concept of Web3, be proficient in the relevant programming languages, and have the right tech stack for the job. Currently, Web3 developers are in high demand and there are an estimated half a million Web3 developers globally, compared to 32 million Web2 developers.

Below are the top 10 Web 3-related developer jobs to apply for.