ZONFF investor saysIt is Zonff Partners' in-depth thinking about investment, business, technology and the future.

This article is about 4000 words
About 15 minutes to read
Author: Colin

Adhering to the concept of openness, fairness, and efficiency, the Internet has been developing vigorously for nearly forty years. However, as the development of the consumer Internet has reached a bottleneck, the Internet has not only failed to make major commercial or technological progress in the past five years, but has frequently fallen into data privacy and information Among the negative public opinion such as cocoon room. I think that as the next generation of the Internet, the Web 3.0 structural concept bears our expectations for the development of the Internet in the next two decades, and also provides a development idea for whether the Internet can be great again.

First, let's make a descriptive definition of Web 3.0, here we will expand it from two dimensions.

The first dimension is data rights, that is, the description of the production relationship and who owns the production materials.Regarding the description of this dimension, let me borrow two classic expressions:

The new Internet paradigm promotes the transformation of the Internet to a more democratized direction. - Messari Web 2.0
Leaping over to Web 3.0, your success is my opportunity. — Chris Dixon, Partner at a16z

Messari is currently one of the top research institutions in the blockchain field in the world. Not to mention the famous A16Z, the top venture capital investment institution in the world today has invested in Facebook, Internet giants such as Airbnb, Instagram, and Twitter, and as one of the earliest investment institutions to deploy blockchain, can now see A16Z behind the hot Coinbase, Robinhood, Roblox, etc.

These two classic expressions focus on the description of production relations, that is, who owns the means of production? Should the Internet platform obtain the right to use the core means of production, that is, data, and have the right to use the data to monetize or even take a commission? The existing Internet is efficient enough, but is it fair enough?

In the process of continuous evolution of the Internet, it is inevitable to experience changes in production relations and ownership of production materials. In the Web 3.0 era, we are bound to usher in a more open, fair, and efficient world.

Dimension 2 focuses on value circulation, that is, the description of the transformation from the information distribution method to the value distribution method,

secondary title

Why do we need Web 3.0

Next, we mainly analyze why we need Web 3.0, that is, the necessity and inevitability of the development of the Internet towards Web 3.0. Before discussing this issue, we will briefly sort out Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

We analyze Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 from two aspects of technical architecture characteristics and information transmission characteristics.

The first is Web 1.0. The cornerstone technologies of the Internet emerged in the 1980s, such as LTCP, IP, SMTP, and HTTP. The explosion of applications in the next 20 years is also based on this, such as the early search engine AltaVista, Netscape Netscape Communications , MSN and Yahoo, etc., are all company names that sound relatively old.The technical infrastructure of the Web 1.0 period usually exists in the form of open source agreements, which constitute the basis of open interconnection and meet the characteristics of a fair infrastructure. However, since open source is difficult to monetize, there is no clear way to make profits.

The characteristics of information transmission are reflected by the way users initially interact with the network. In the first iteration of the network, most users are passive users of content and can only browse text and pictures passively, while the website is a read-only website. , this is the slow and controlled era of Web 1.0.

In the Web 2.0 stage, at the beginning of the 21st century, we ushered in a group of companies with the most profitable capabilities in human business history, such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, etc.From the perspective of content transmission, users in the Web 2.0 stage do not simply receive information through access, but also create content by themselves.For example, UGC, PGC and other terms related to content output were also produced at this stage. The influence of the Internet and Internet people is increasing day by day. An Internet celebrity can suddenly make a brand or business popular, and it can also attract bad reviews. Like the tide.

From a technical point of view, technologies in the Web 2.0 era perfect or complement the protocol versions missing in the Web 1.0 stage, such as search networks, social networks, media sharing, etc., but appear in the form of closed protocols or closed platforms.For users and third-party developers, these platforms hold most of the development power and all data control rights. They control every interaction between users on the platform, and each user's ability to seamlessly exit and switch to other platforms , the discovery and distribution potential of content creators, all capital flows, and the relationship between all third-party developers and their users, these giants also have extremely strong liquidity and profitability.

The development of the Internet to this stage has violated the spirit of freedom and openness advocated at the beginning of its creation, or the original intention of the establishment of the World Wide Web - "to give people equal access to information." We are faced with information cocoons, we have to watch advertisements we don’t want to see, and face the dilemma of data assets being abused."Centralization" has become a feature of the later stage of Web 2.0, and Internet giants have become the gatekeepers of data, trust, and innovation.Therefore, at this stage of the development of the Internet, the direction of our concern has changed, from not doing evil to not being able to do evil, how to be as fair and open as the Web 1.0 era, how to trust that the Internet still has great innovation capabilities, and become a living in this world. One of the biggest problems facing us of our time.

Before talking about Web 3.0, we can talk about trust first. You can imagine that we mentioned that we believe that something will happen or not happen. What is the essential basis for it?

can be roughly divided into several categories,

One is due to social factors or social relations, such as brand and reputation, credit history, etc.;
The second is the objective basic laws of mathematics and physics;
The third is based on a rational competitive game relationship. If one thing is not worth the loss, there is a high probability that it will not happen. This is the basic logic of building trust in Web 3.0, that is, increasing the cost of doing evil. That is to say, if the gain outweighs the loss, then naturally no evil will happen.

The apocalypse event of Web 3.0 is naturally the birth of the Bitcoin network, which has triggered a series of thinking about cryptography and open source protocols. When you hear "cryptography", you may think of encryption and confidentiality. But by far the most important application of cryptography has nothing to do with secrecy. Rather, it's about making data tamper-proof, such as digital signatures, a breakthrough in modern cryptography that allow "A" to send "B" a message that "B" can be sure (mathematically) that it really came from "A ". Cryptography and open source protocols constitute the cornerstone of the Web 3.0 network. The database of open source protocols ensures fairness and openness, and cryptography ensures that no one will do evil in terms of mathematics and programming.

secondary title

Application and Features of Web 3.0

The main protocol directions of Web 3.0 generally fall into six categories

One is the technical basis,

Development Platformstorage
storagenetwork
networkFor example, distributed gateway and network acceleration service, these two modules can be understood as distributed Alibaba Cloud;

middleware

middlewarePlay an important role as a bridge, such as an oracle, to ensure that the world on the chain corresponds to the reality of the physical world;
Data, Identity and Privacy，The Web 3.0 world only needs one identity system to connect all applications, but it needs to ensure data privacy;
finallyopen finance,Finance is currently the largest application market, and blockchain technology has great application prospects in supply chain finance and business auditing;

The characteristics of Web 3.0 applications we can learn fromtwo dimensionsFrom the point of view, for the service provider, the code of the platform needs to be open source, the direction of operation and development is determined by the community, and the main profits are distributed to value creators or core users in a predictable way. It can also be compatible with the business model of Web 2.0 and A new business model is derived. From the above picture, we can see that the main business applications of Web 2.0 can already find the corresponding early products of Web 3.0.

For users, users have ownership of the contributed content and can get a certain return. They have decision-making power over their private data and potential monetization paths. Users have confidence in the power and data privacy promised by the platform. This is actually a Confidence in cryptography, and partial ownership has the power to transfer across platforms and applications, and can be reused. For example, data on platform A can be realized on platform B.

We can imagine that these features of Web 3.0 will greatly improve the current Internet ecology. Through Web 3.0, an open-source, efficient, user-identified metaverse world will be built. Web 3.0 The metaverse below will be integrated into real life, and people's work, entertainment, and life will operate in a brand new media and economic environment.

Mark Zuckerberg just recently announced that FACEBOOK will no longer be a social media platform, but will become a "metaverse company", and FACEBOOK's parent company has also changed its name to Meta. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, also promoted the creation of a "Metaverse Enterprise". More and more investment institutions, technology leaders, and industry giants have stepped down to deploy the Metaverse, and the Metaverse has become a grand vision spanning countless companies and even different industries.

exist

existinfrastructure,exist
existprotocol standard,exist
existcontent production,Users will participate in the construction of the metaverse, and new editors, media, and artificial intelligence will create a new content production and the accompanying economic model;

Of course, the pure use of blockchain technology will also have some theoretical limitations.More innovations in distributed network infrastructure are needed,For example, distributed databases to prevent data loss and redundancy and the high cost of multi-node backup,Every state modification requires a cryptographic consensus process,This will also affect storage efficiency to a certain extent,The third is that the query efficiency is not high,Traditional SQL databases have made a lot of optimizations for structured storage and query, while distributed storage is still unattainable in terms of convenience.

Finally, I want to talk about where we are in Web 3.0, let me start with the conclusion,Web 3.0 has completed the stage from 0 to 1, and now it is in the period of development and expansion from 1 to N.Blockchain thought, as our sovereign enlightenment including data rights and privacy rights, has completed science popularization for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Continuous innovation and developers have improved the security and convenience of infrastructure, and also triggered global entrepreneurship. Thinking about new business models.

Now we jump out of the original blockchain thinking and enter into a larger technology application cycle to think,

On the one hand, it is policy and support. The development of Web 3.0 depends on the policy orientation of various countries, more education and talent support systems, including the regulation and data security policies that may be caused by data black swan events;
The second is the use and popularization of applications. Various indicators and theories in the Web 2.0 stage will be of reference, such as customer acquisition costs, user retention, Cohert analysis, etc. New business models and profit distribution will appear in the Web 3.0 era;
Finally, there is the business cycle. When a disruptive technology emerges, the impact of innovation on the original system will further accelerate the growth curve after the breakthrough of the technological foundation;

From these three aspects, we can see that Web 3.0 has entered a period of rapid expansion, and the next tipping point may happen tomorrow.

The next development still depends on the technical foundation and business application scenariostwo directions。

From a technical point of view, Web 3.0 requires a lower-cost, safer, and upgradeable infrastructure to make the experience closer to Web 2.0. It still needs better community governance theories and tools to promote model innovation.

From the perspective of application, the maturity of the four types of scenarios in the above figure is gradually decreasing. Finance and games already have considerable application scenarios and prototypes. Here, the first three types can also complete the closed-loop experience with the current components and infrastructure, while the third type The four categories also rely on more offline links and cooperation with other technologies, such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and so on.

As a young investor, it is a lucky thing to catch the tail of the mobile Internet wave. We live and grow up in the information age, and we have witnessed the evolution of the Internet from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. But more fortunately, we were able to encounter Web 3.0. I firmly believe that the next generation Internet is a twenty-year investment proposition. We really need a fairer and more innovative network. We also look forward to continuously witnessing valuable Technologies and applications continue to emerge, and we also believe that the next ecological opportunity at the mobile Internet level will be born from Web 3.0-related fields.