Due to some canny marketing by some venture capitalists, the term Web3 became very popular last year. Is it just a new hype word? Well some believe a revolution is coming.
Now the everyday person is writing free Amazon reviews and posting YouTube videos and these platforms are using the data to build their huge empires which makes it difficult for new platforms to compete.
Web3 is about decentralising the web, away from the top large platforms like Google and Meta (formerly Facebook).
To do this is uses blockchain, a database which is distributed across several computers, rather than one server. No organisation or person owns it. It stores a full record of every transaction and no one can alter the information, unless they take over the majority of the computers in the network. As such there is no organisation that enforces the rules or needs to be trusted.
The idea behind Web3, in theory, is to ensure you have full control and ownership of your data. If you don’t like a particular service you can take your data to another.
For example there are lots of Web3 startups trying to create blockchain alternatives to platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Spotify.
The main blockchain used for Web3 is Ethereum which has its own programming language to enable developers to build apps and create a new decentralised digital infrastructure.
Anyone can create their own DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation). For this you will need the help of developers to integrate your site with Ethereum Name Service (ENS). ENS is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system.