What is Web 3.0 ?

I was asked an interesting question in Quora …

In a nutshell Web 3.0 has four components, in addition to the current Web 2.0:

1. Extremely Mobile with high bandwidth — Think 5G
2. Decentralized — The DLT (Distributed Ledger Technologies), DeFi (Distributed Finance), NFT, VA (Virtual Assets), dApps et al. Some call this web3
3. Intelligent — again a nebulous term, yet includes AI components at various levels; may be even some ideas from the Semantic Web !
4. Interactive, Virtual engagement — Think 3D, AR/VR, Metaverse

Once these are in place and working together, the internet as we know will change, in all aspects of life — play, learn, work, entertain, travel and everything in between.

My estimate is around 10 years to mature; we will see important changes in 5 years and will start talking about Web 4.0 in 7 years !

Even now we can feel the world shift under us — Tiktok vs YouTube, Metaverse vs Gaming Systems, Siri/Alexa et al being ubiquitous, …

Couple of caveats:

1. I don’t think there is a distinction between web3 and Web 3.0. Some tend to think web3 as the crypto technologies (DLT in broader terms) while Web 3.0 as the internet
2. Also, DLT is a broader term and Blockchain is a specific type of DLT. Both are transaction stores; we can have DLT in replicated distributed databases, if we want so. But blockchain has interesting properties that transcend normal data stores
3. dApp vs a web app also has distinctive differences. Web 3.0 will have very different feel than Web 2.0 w.r.t. how we share content, how we interact with it and even how the content is monetized
4. Earlier, Web 3.0 was the “semantic web” which I don’t think holds true anymore. May be Siri/Alexa is semantic web component, may be GPT-3 is semantic web component,…

Quora Link

Thanks to Sygnum for the picture. Their Intro to Web 3.0 is a good read.