Web 3 and the basics of business evolution
Although the Internet remains a driving force in digital transformation, the technology has expanded well beyond its intended boundaries. The web has been subjected to rising degrees of centralization and mass monitoring since its debut more than two decades ago. As a result, huge businesses, governments, and media outlets continue to be the principal beneficiaries of an infrastructure designed to benefit mankind as a whole. This is the issue with today’s Internet ecology, often known as Web 2.0.
While major corporations should not be blamed for their involvement in our daily lives, their influence over our personal information is cause for alarm. “For individuals who want to make sure the Web serves mankind,” Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee famously stated, “we have to be concerned about what others are constructing on top of it.”
This sentiment lies at the heart of the Web 3.0 movement. Although blockchain technology is at the core of this movement, the scope of the endeavour is far larger. The goal of Web 3.0 is to create a decentralised infrastructure that preserves individual property and privacy. But what precisely does this look like, and what are the possible consequences? In this article we’ll look at how Internet infrastructure has evolved and how the coming of Web 3.0 is affecting established business models.
Web Evolution:
The Internet began with simple “read-only” technology, which allowed users to just search for and read content. This Web 1.0 environment was designed largely for advertising, operating as an extension of real stores. With the addition of “read-write” capabilities, Web 2.0 users could now generate content and engage with the Internet on a much deeper level. This infrastructure continues to influence global business models by supporting the rapid rise of social media platforms, blogs, and online reviews.
However, as previously mentioned, this period of rapid expansion has not been without disadvantages. As web monitoring supports profitable data collecting, consumer safeguards continue to lag behind corporate objectives. The ongoing data breaches adequately demonstrate the disadvantages of this setup. In response to these difficulties, Web 3.0 efforts seek to return power to consumers. But, before delving into how this will happen, it’s critical to grasp the key Web 3.0 traits that will make this possible.
Web 3.0 Characteristics: Although Web 3.0 is difficult to describe in precise terms, it may be efficiently split down into several components.
Semantic Web: The semantic online enhances existing web infrastructure by producing, distributing, and linking material based on word interpretation. Instead of depending on keywords and figures, search and analysis make use of context.
Web 3.0 has better connectedness as a result of semantic information. The user experience increases considerably when all accessible information is utilised.
AI : Web 3.0 digests information in a manner akin to humans. As a consequence, platforms may better meet the demands of their users through continual learning.
Three Dimensional Infrastructure: The presence of 3D is huge on various Web 3.0 platforms. Computer games, e-commerce apps, and mapping software are just a few examples of possible uses.
In the decentralised Web 3.0 environment, every material is accessible by many apps, every device connects to the web, and all related services are available everywhere.
Businesses may create apps with distributed logic that span thousands of blockchain nodes.
Blockchain technology’s decentralised design provides enormous usefulness to companies in the next generation of the web. Instead of hosting platforms or apps on servers controlled and maintained by a single central authority, organisations may create applications with logic spread among thousands of blockchain nodes, providing transparency and immutability.
Transparency and verifiability :
Although transparency and verifiability may not appear to be immediately important, their existence addresses several challenges for firms that entrepreneurs may be unaware of. Full transparency implies that changes to logic and data are visible and traceable to the network, so everyone knows where they originated from, that they are immutable, and that data correctness and provenance can be easily checked.
In fact, most firms rely on reliable financial reporting. For e.g. in a conventional system, anyone in the supply chain who falsifies reporting or commits mistakes can have serious consequences.That said, it’s often a manual process and time consuming. More importantly it’s extremely hard to learn who committed the mistake since there’s a lack of smart automation.
However, if supply chain reporting was based on a blockchain, the culpable party could be quickly identified and the process remedied.
In manufacturing, there’s a good amount of scope as well. If we take the automobile sector, it can have excellent outcomes. Car makers can readily uncover inefficiencies and speed up manufacturing by hosting supply networks on a blockchain.
In healthcare on the other hand, blockchain technology has the potential to improve and make more efficient the contemporary model where data inaccuracies are dominant.
Tamper-proof patient records, enhancing patient privacy, and protecting medical data can all be achieved easily. Even in insurance possibilities are immense. Claim processes will be fairly easy and efficient by employing decentralised architecture and smart contracts.
Web3 would be exciting for parametric insurance; when an insurable event happens and specified requirements are satisfied, a smart contract can automatically activate the relevant reward. A passenger who schedules a ticket and purchases flight insurance, for example, will get an automatic payout if the trip is cancelled. There are no additional documents to fill out and no delays — just a simple cryptographic protocol (smart contract) solution that eliminates the complications of traditional claims processes.
A unified force of decentralized applications :
While discussing future use cases, it’s vital to highlight that, although located on a blockchain, these apps will not operate in isolation. All of these decentralized applications will operate together in Web 3.0, just as they do now, to deliver integrated capability that renders them more efficient. The insurance contract mentioned above, for example, may receive data from a healthcare application and transmit a signal to an inventory control contract. As such, APIs will serve as the “glue” that unites these disparate apps in the same manner that they did in Web 2.0.
Accept and innovate, rather than regret :
Finally, we’re not claiming that Web 3.0 or blockchain will solve all of the world’s or even your company’s problems. But one shouldn’t be frightened to experiment with new technology because how we innovate will decide the future of any technology, especially this.
Ignoring Web 3.0 now would have the same results as not adapting to the internet a quarter century ago.
It is probable that the benefits of improved openness, verifiability, availability, and confidence will be well worth your time.
