Silicon Valley employees rush to Web3, which will be the future of the Internet?

Jan.2022, Lesley@footprint.network

Former social giant Twitter Spaces chief data scientist Julien GaillardAnnounce on Twitterimage description

Source: Twitter

Previously, Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave, said that he was considering building Twitter on Ethereum and establishing a Web3 decentralized social platform. Julien Gaillard said that the core value of Web3 lies in its decentralization, innovation, fairness and experimentation, as well as its open source and transparency.

At the same time, David Marcus, head of the Facebook (now Meta) cryptocurrency project, also started on January 1, 2022.Own Web3 startup project。

Another Meta employee, Evan Cheng, also resigned in September last year and founded a dedicatedMystyLab of blockchain infrastructurethe interviewthe interviewAccording to the report, 80% of his team's employees come from the Web2 Internet industry.

The world of Web3

Web3 is a new iterative idea of ​​the World Wide Web. The core of its development based on blockchain technology lies in decentralization and decentralization to the people.

web1 is a static read-only network, web2 is a social network that everyone can contribute to, and web3 is a distributed decentralized network.

Although the specific concept of Web3 is still somewhat vague at present, in general, it is to distribute the management and supervision rights of Web2 belonging to Internet companies more widely through discussion-proposal-voting-implementation. The right to decide will be assigned to each Internet participant, and the participants will decide the direction of the Internet platform or project.

according to

according toData from Footprint Analyticsimage description

Footprint Analytics - Crypto Market Cap

Blockchain originated from Bitcoin, which was born in Satoshi Nakamoto's paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" (Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System) in 2008. Electronic payment system. Due to distrust of the centralized regulatory system and financial system, Bitcoin chooses to put trust on a distributed, decentralized public ledger, and a decentralized consensus mechanism - the blockchain, so that it can be free from Audit by centralized organization.

As a pioneer in the application layer of blockchain technology, decentralized finance (DeFi) is an important step for the Internet to move towards Web3. So far, in the application layer of blockchain technology, the field of decentralized finance (DeFi) still occupies a dominant position.Footprint Analyticsimage description

Footprint Analytics - DeFi TVL

With the gradual maturity of blockchain technology, blockchain application projects similar to decentralized finance have also achieved remarkable results. Decentralized autonomy (DAO) is widely used in blockchain projects, and tracks such as NFT and Metaverse ushered in Explosive growth, data cloud storage is becoming more and more mature. People gradually want to push this restriction on centralized rights to all aspects of the Internet, and promote the development of the Internet in the direction of Web3.

What problem does Web3 solve?

Private issues

• Private issues

Technology companies collect a large amount of user data, which is mainly used to improve their content recommendation mechanism and provide users with better services. But at the same time, data security and personal privacy issues have aroused people's concerns. In 2018, the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica was exposed for obtaining the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent to help the previous US election. This has caused users to have great distrust of centralized technology companies.

November 2021,A poll by the Washington PostAccording to the survey, 72% of the people don't trust Facebook either very much or not at all.

At present, government legislation is mainly used to solve similar data and privacy abuses, but when the public's trust in the government is also reduced, perhaps it is a better approach to decentralize rights.

In the field of Web3, people save data through distributed data storage to prevent personal data from being used by centralized institutions. At present, some projects have made certain attempts, such asDecentralized Storage Arweave, Secret Network built for data privacy and more.

• freedom of speech

In January 2021, Twitter banned the account of former US President Donald Trump for inciting violence, which also sparked worldwide discussions on freedom of speech.

At the heart of these discussions is whether a social media company has the right to censor speech on its own. But if the Web3 era really comes, if rights can be distributed to every Internet user, will the world have a freer Internet environment?

The puzzle on the road to Web3

• Is capital willing to give up centralized power

On the road to Web3, one of the puzzles is: can people really compete with the technology giants, or capital, and get rights?

Obviously, quite a few people don't believe it. On December 21, 2021, Twitter founder and Block CEO Jackindicated on twitterimage description

Source: Twitter

Web3 needs technology and capital. Whether technology giants and venture capital firms feel decentralization is meaningful is crucial to the evolution of the Internet. The final form of Web3 largely depends on the attitude of technology and capital. Only with the support of technology and capital, can Web3, a new Internet form, be formed faster.

• The entry threshold of Web3 is much higher than that of Web2

In addition to doubts about capital and technology giants, the high threshold in the blockchain field is also one of the things people worry about. As of midnight on January 18, the total number of DeFi users was 4.36 million. This gap with the traditional financial field largely stems from the high threshold in the blockchain field. Compared with traditional finance, which has already developed and matured, DeFi is more difficult to get started.

The same is true for other areas of the blockchain application layer. After people adapt to centralized technology companies, it always takes a certain amount of time to accept brand new platforms and systems. The advent of the Web2 era has lowered the threshold for making contributions on the Internet, allowing everyone to contribute content on the Internet. Unlike the low threshold that everyone can join in the Web2 network, it seems that Web3 still needs more efforts from everyone in terms of access threshold.

Both the blockchain and Bitcoin fields have active evangelists spreading knowledge and ideas. How long it will take for Web3 to come depends on the actions of Web3 evangelists and the development of technology.

The future of Web3

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