What is Web3 and how does it relate to the metaverse?
Web3 aims to recover the decentralization of the early days of the Internet, reduce the dependence of users on big technologies, give them back control of their data and make the network more secure, free of cybercrime and widespread service outages.
The next evolution of the internet
Web1 was the read-only web (‘read’) and was used to host static pages on the internet. Web2, the current paradigm, is read-write (‘read-write’), which #Metaverse development company allows users to interact with services and feed them information. Web3 will be read-write-trust. Alfonso de la Rocha , professor at the European University, engineer and researcher at Protocol Labs, refers to this when he explains that for this reason, many people refer to Web3 as the “Internet of Value” .
Web3 and all the technology developed around it are intended to reduce our dependence on large technology companies and their infrastructure, “reducing the entry barriers for small players and allowing end users to become service providers,” de la Rocha concludes. This evolution of the internet also seeks to introduce the exchange of value (in the form of currencies or digital assets) as a basic premise, in the same way that the exchange of information exists today.
How Web3 affects the internet as a whole
Web3 has a clear goal : to return to the essence of the decentralized internet from the beginning, but providing it with more immersive and humanized developments . This is indicated by Héctor Paz Espallargas , a professor at the School of Architecture and Technology of the San Jorge University, who highlights the objective of returning the user to the center and taking control of their own digital identity. “Having the power to decide who gives their data, in what way and to what extent they have privacy,” says Paz, who is a professor in the degrees in Video Game Design and Development and Digital Design and Creative Technologies.
Through ‘blockchain’ technology , each digital asset and each movement is registered and protected in the cloud by a long list of blocks that are difficult to alter. Thus, according to the teacher, web pages, hyperlinks, profiles on social networks and sharing our most personal data would be left behind. Because with Web3 everything would be transferred to our personal and anonymous ‘wallets’, which “ will allow us to travel through the metaverse keeping our digital identity intact between the different virtual spaces”.
Users can access these types of virtual spaces through the Internet and, once in them, they can interact with avatars, train, entertain themselves or purchase products or services. The metaverse development services and Web3 complement each other. “The metaverse becomes the great digital universe and Web3 the technology that gives it life and allows you to travel through the different worlds”, emphasizes Paz.
The rise of decentralized finance
The financial system, like the Internet, is yet another platform that can benefit from all the developments carried out around the Web3. With this new version of the internet, it is expected that there will be an extension of decentralization through smart contracts stored on the ‘blockchain’.
Decentralized finance ( or DeFi, for its acronym in English) is a set of applications based on ‘blockchain’ networks that, in principle, do not need intermediaries to work. As Carlos Torres Vila , president of BBVA and ambassador of the Code.org initiative in Spain, explains, they allow “anyone at any scale to participate in both using and offering financial services, with no intermediary other than a computer program.” Interest in this type of finance has grown in recent years, according to the World Economic Forum .
To safer internet
With Web3, it is also intended to improve the Internet architecture to make it more secure . The objective, according to De la Rocha, would thus be to eliminate ‘phishing’ , reduce the need to use infinite passwords for each service, the development of ‘offline-first’ applications (that continue to function without an Internet connection) or avoid the general fall of the internet due to the failure of a single infrastructure.
This is especially important considering the great dependency of millions of companies on some infrastructure. At the end of 2020, Google services — Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps or the Google Drive cloud storage service — suffered a drop for about 45 minutes. Last year Facebook suffered a six-hour outage that spread to WhatsApp and Instagram and affected 2.7 billion users. The impact of this type of falls is increasing and can generate millions in losses.
The transition to the Web3
Although the transition from Web2 to Web3 has already begun, it is still far from achieving mass adoption. “Although there are still years of development to make Web3 ‘mainstream’, we are already seeing small actions with exponential growth,” metaverse development solutions says Paz. Among the most popular blockchain-based products are NFTs and there are also 3D interactive environments to interact in the business metaverse.
To achieve greater implementation of the next Internet revolution, there are those who consider it necessary to improve the user experience . As De la Rocha indicates, using Web3 is not easy: “In the same way that to use Web2 you don’t have to know how protocols like HTTP, TCP or IP work, a Web3 user shouldn’t have to know what it is . Ethereum, that your files are stored in IPFS or File coin, what is a CID (Content Identifier) or a DID (Decentralized ID) or how to sign a transaction with a ‘wallet’”. Until this changes, the engineer doesn’t think a real transition from Web2 to Web3 will take place. “What I do know for sure is that sooner or later this change is going to come,” he concludes.
