Web 3 is a relatively new concept that covers a large number of different technological components. While there are a lot of misunderstandings around what it is and what it means, at its core, it is about giving control of the assets and services people use in an internet-enabled world back to the people who use them.
There are many different technologies that make up the web3 ecosystem. Probably the easiest way to think about what technologies qualify as web3 is to take a look at web2. Web2 was largely a move from self-hosted small architectural setups to large cloud-based setups. Major corporations like Google and Amazon literally built their business providing these services. Everything from servers for hosting, drives for storage, networking and security, and pretty much any other component you would need to host your company’s infrastructure is provided in their clouds. The upside to this is that for the simple price of swiping a credit card you could eliminate much of the difficult operations work required to run applications. However, the trade-off was that you now had to trust the company you were buying resources from. In many cases, especially in the retail space, those companies might be your competition. Additionally, each company that provided resources had its own license agreements and other contracts that you would need to abide by in order to use their services. For most people, the costs were outweighed by the benefits but for many, this would cause serious issues.
Just like web2 was a major jump from the web1. Web3 is an equally large jump from web2. Web3 takes the concept of using other people’s infrastructure and resources to host your workloads and works to give you back the control that you had in the web1 world when you were running on your own hardware. One of the other key differences with web3 is that everything is decentralized. This means the control over these different resources and tools is rarely held by a single entity and most of the services being provided don’t even have the ability to deplatform you if they wanted to. There is no relying on the goodwill of a bloated company to keep your apps online. No contracts need to govern the relationships because everything is built to allow untrustworthy people to trust each other.
There are many different kinds of web3 services. These services each fill different parts of the picture. For example, if you need to stand up a website, you don’t go to a single provider of resources and stand up all your infrastructure. It requires multiple providers since each service component generally is distinct from the rest. If you need storage you can go to Arweave, Skynet, or Filecoin. For computing power, you can go to the Akash Network for high-power hosting or Golem for small compute jobs. For networking and security companies like Sentinel provide a number of services. You put all these things together and you have a rough equivalent to what the web2 companies offer to their clients. Having these different services spread out over a large number of providing entities makes deplatforming your apps even harder. Someone would have to find a way to take you off of each service individually and even if they somehow managed that there are many alternative providers to easily migrate to in order to keep things running.
This reason alone was enough for me to get a job in the web3 space. I truly believe the only way we aren’t all serving large corporations in the next 50 years is by taking our future back. Self-sovereignty is critical to maintaining the freedom to make our own basic decisions about life. I want to do my part to protect our future and that I why I am deeply involved in the Akash Network.