The increasingly popular word in the Tech world particularly in Silicon Valley is now Web 3 which is being perceived as the future of the Internet. It is a creation of strong sponsors of Cryptocurrency technology. Web 3 will be a departure from the current internet technology controlled by a few tech giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter and others but rather an Internet for everyone. It will be a decentralized World Wide Web platform based on several people’s opinion.
Here’s how the World Wide Web has evolved since it began in the 1990s;
Web 1 was an internet of documents, a passive and more or less ‘read-only’ web. The capacity of the platform was just to host and display text documents and information materials without a mix of audiovisual materials. It was dominated by Yahoo and AOL.
Web 2 began its cruise in 2005 leading to the emergence of the club of social media players with the dominance of the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedln, Zoom, Youtube, while Tik-Tok, Snapchat, Slack et al were also part of the competition within the space. Web 2 was monopolized and controlled by few and abused by so many people in terms of online and offline data and voice engagements.
Web3 is birthing with features that mitigate the shortcomings of the first two phases of the World Wide Web. Web3 applications will be independent, free of intermediaries, pivoted on the cryptocurrencies blockchain technology with similar security features and crypto level of verifications. It will be tokenised and accessed on peer-to-peer distributed networks just in line with Web 3 Foundation vision that states that “Our passion is delivering Web 3.0, a decentralized and fair internet where users control their own data, identity and destiny”.
Speeding to the market
Venture capitalists are the major props of activities within the space, VCs
invested $30 billion in crypto projects last year, according to research company PitchBook. Much of that went into Web3 startups such as Sky Mavis, developer of
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According to Forbes, there is a growing activity within the WEB 3 space albeit not yet significant. Users of the WEB 3 Internet technology are still in their millions and it has been observed within the Fintech space that mass-market applications gain substantial traction when an underlining tech reaches 1 billion users or more. Hence, with current observation, WEB 3 still have some more years ahead of it to gain substantial domination and leadership of the internet market engagements.
However, investors through Venture Capital companies are already positioning themselves for this premium internet market movement. Some very high-level metrics on VCs participation obtained from Bloomberg on the 2021 market:
- VCs deployed $30B+globally in 2021 into crypto startups
- There are 65+ crypto unicorns, with over 40 of them created in 2021. There were close to 50 crypto startups that raised over $100M in 2021
- Total crypto market cap exceeded $3T
Web3 will leverage tokens and adopt decentralized technology that will be disruptive to the centralized intermediaries and the general negative vibes that currently dominates the Web2 space.
The trend of technological growth shows that Cryptocurrencies, Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and ultimately the WEB3 is bound to change the transactional landscape of people. However, the decentralisation and independence of the new platform is a objective to achieve and the major appeal of the migration for stakeholders.
