Definition: Web3

The third version of the World Wide Web. Different goals have been attributed to Web3, but they all revolve around user ownership and privacy. Blockchains and decentralized finance were called Web3 technologies because they give people ownership of their data and enable them to make private transactions. Although it never took off, in 2020, the Cirus platform emerged to pay users crypto tokens for the data they handily give away browsing the Web (see Cirus platform). See DeFi.

In the mid-2020s, the Web3 moniker has taken another turn, promoted by Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web. His Inrupt company promotes the Solid protocol, which enables people to keep their data in private pods that they release to companies as required. Of course, this requires a new protocol layer for the entire Web. User empowerment has always been the premise behind Web3.

Web1 and Web2
When the Web launched in the mid-1990s, it was mostly static content provided by website creators. In the 2000s, the so-called Web2 added dynamic content from websites, but more significantly, from users on blogs, wikis and social networks. Web2 saw an explosion of user content on social media and opinions on every subject known to mankind. Everyone was enabled to publish their thoughts to everyone else.

Under Web2, the general public provides the information and tech behemoths such as Google and Meta (Facebook) make fortunes from it. Amazon sells tons of merchandise from users' freely given product reviews. See Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

Years Ago, It Was the Semantic Web
Web 3.0 was also envisioned as the Semantic Web, in which all data were identified in a knowledge base. See Semantic Web.

Different Ways to Express Web3
Web3 is contrasted to Web1 and Web2 succinctly in the following examples:

  From the Coinbase Exchange

  Web1  Read
  Web2  Write
  Web3  Read/Write/Own


  From the ZenLedger Website

  Web1  Read
  Web2  Read/Write
  Web3  Read/Write/Execute


  From the Cyberscrilla Website

  Web1  Information Economy (Read)
  Web2  Social Economy (Read/Write)
  Web3  Token Economy (Read/Write/Execute)