🛸 web3, web4, web5: A sneak peek into the future

Hello and welcome to all 1,600 of you fellow supporters! 🙏

What is web3?

It’s no secret I have a thing for web3 - I’ve already talked about it a couple of times at the beginning of The Chase - first touching the concept of how hiring happens differently and then how it’s changing the nature of work all-together .

But for this week I thought it would be good to take a step back, shortly describing how we got to this stage, and then taking a short step forwards, taking a peek into what the future could look like.

If we were to summarize the different stages of the internet, we could try this:

web1: Static web - first websites, portals and online services were developed, and users could only read the information, without the chance of direct interaction.

web2: Social/Collaborative web - proliferation of social networks and all the applications such as blogs, forums and podcasts that made new forms of participative communication possible.

web3: Decentralized web - the rise of blockchain technology enabling all of the above (communication, information exchanges) to be decentralized, dis-intermediated, privatized, democratized (the list goes on).

How is web3 being used?

The main usage so far has been for finance, called ‘De-Fi’, through Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and so on. But the proliferation of the underlying technologies (so-called ‘Chains’, ‘Protocols’) has enabled many more use-cases and has been the basis for ‘DApps’ (decentralized-apps) which are basically like the apps you use today, but decentralized (i.e. no single private owner - think of an app like Uber, but without a company like Uber owning it - just a bunch of user to user transactions on the blockchains, called ‘Smart Contracts’).

There are thousands of start-ups that are now purely web3 (here you can see a list of the top 25) but we are currently in a very early stage (much like when web1 and web2 started - a big-bang-like explosion of interest, ideas etc) and will still need for the wind to blow off the perfect storm that fell on the tons of speculation (remember the Dot-Com bubble?) that took place in the last couple of years, that is now seeing a huge drop in capitalization (what is being called a ‘Crypto Winter’) much connected to the bear market/recession-like trends of the overall stock market.

How many people are working in web3?

The number of participants in DAOs grew in 2021 from 13,000 to 1.7 million.

Why? DAOs (If you’re curious - check out the top 25 you should know) could become the perfect entity for decentralized collaboration in the metaverse. DAOs promise new forms of organization structures, as significant digital value is created, through non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

But how many people (developers) are actually building web3?

Much like in web2 there is a shortage of developers, web3 - given its infancy and incredible acceleration - with just under 20,000 web3 developers. It’s also interesting to notice (though not surprisingly) that this number has increased together with the rise of network value / price increases of cryptocurrencies (unfortunately I could only find the chart from 2021, so I would expect a different curve going into 2022)

What the hell is web4 and web5?

Now, you must be rightfully thinking: ‘web3 has just started, so why the hell would we talk about web4 or even web5?’

Good question.

The truth: we are obsessed with giving things names (completely side-topic, but for the curious: ‘Why we name’) since they give power to story-tell, give emotions and categorize/separate things clearly even though there are minor differences - also called ‘Narcism of minor-differences’ which applies to Us vs Them social reasoning.

The story that is being told:

• web3 has a lot of fallacies - Bitcoin wasn’t meant to solve all of the problems we talked about, it was conceived as a digital currency (it’s too slow to process transactions, cost-ineffective due to high ‘gas-fees’) so a new world of ‘Layers’ are being created on top to process information in different ways (in parallel, or through other chains)

• While web3 is still considered about being human-human centered, web4 is going to shift to the interaction between humans and machines (like intelligent personal agents, and moving to a fully ‘virtual economy’ based on digital goods on the metaverse). It is also called ‘the mobile web’ - having the necessary infrastructure to adapt to the mobile environment. Imagine a web that connects all mobile devices in the real and virtual world in real-time.

• web5: a PR stunt? - In 2009, Tim Berners-Lee (the creator of the internet in person!) talked about web5 in a Ted talk. He talked about it as ‘The Emotional web’ where linked data and intelligent algorithms would be much closer to our human-like needs and emotions. On the other hand, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, announced in June 2022 that he was going to build web5 and will focus on decentralizing identity, data storage, as well as its applications. How does it differ from web3? He promises a Decentralized Web Platform built on three main pillars:And goes on to make some examples of how they are going to be built and real-life examples of applications, like this one for booking travel, where the promise is to have every preference, ticket, and other data stored in one place, owned by the user itself.If you want to check out the full-document you can find it here:

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