What?! Wait a second… Web3 and Web 3.0, ain’t they the same?!

What I’m going to demystify today is probably one of the most common misconceptions in the blockchain and crypto space. Including myself, only until recently, thanks to one of my students on Udemy who pointed out to me that I had misused this term in one of my masterclasses, I would not have known about this. Read on if you don’t want to make the same mistake as I did!

If you search ‘Web3’ on Wikipedia, this is what you’ll find in the very first sentence of the article:

“This article is about the concept of a World Wide Web based on public blockchains. For the concept based around machine-readability, also called Web 3.0, see Semantic Web.”

You see, even Wikipedia notices this common confusion among most people. Web3 and Web 3.0 are NOT the same.

Web3 and Web 3.0, even though they are both visions of how the Web will ideally be evolved in the future and both are attempting to fix the problems of the current Web, they are fundamentally different.

To put it in simple terms, Web3 refers to the decentralized and blockchain-based web, while Web 3.0 refers to the linked or semantic web. Let’s break them down a bit further.

Web3

To understand Web3, we need to first understand Web1 and 2.

Web1- is the initial version of the internet, where everything was read-only and static with zero interaction.

Web2- it is what the current web is. It refers to the read-and-write version of the internet, where users can create content and share them, other than read-only. This creates a much more interactive version of the internet.

However, there is this dark side of Web2 — centralization. Several giants, such as Google and Facebook actually own and control the data of their users, and they use these data to manipulate users in somewhat unethical ways. Users basically have no control over the ownership of their identity, data and the content they have created.

Here comes Web3. Web3 is tempting to solve this centralization problem by introducing the idea of Read, Write and Own. I talk a lot about Web3 here.

The term ‘Web3’, was coined in 2014 by Gavin Wood, who is the Ethereum co-founder and Polkadot founder. The core idea behind Web3, is to fight against the current centralized dominance and power of the giants, and return the power of ownership back to the users.

But how? Through a decentralized online ecosystem by the implementation of blockchain. The vision of Web3 is to let the users be in total control of their identity, data, and the content they create, and they can decide who can access this information and who cannot. This can be achieved through the use of decentralized data storage powered by blockchain technologies and self-sovereign identity in a community-driven setting, such as DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations — to learn about DAOs, check DAO 101, How to create a DAO in 5 min and this course).

In Web3, you also have ownership on the internet. NFTs, for example, allow us, for the first time in history, to own digital items.

The potential way to achieve this is to have users keeping their own identity, data and content they create in a cryptocurrency wallet like MetaMask. By signing in with this crypto wallet, users can have total control over all their data as they are the only people who have the keys to their wallets. Unlike signing in to a Facebook account or Google right now, you don’t actually have any control over any of your data, but Facebook (or should I say Meta?) does. These centralized platforms can potentially sell your data, lock you out of your account, or even erase your account and all of your data if they want to.

Okay, enough about Web3. How about Web 3.0?

Web 3.0

Web 3.0, also referred to as ‘semantic web,’ is a vision of the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, who described the semantic web as a component of Web 3.0. Semantic Web is essentially an extension of the World Wide Web, through the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium.

What’s the Semantic Web? It refers to the vision of the web where all the data is machine-readable, hence all the data on the internet can be connected with each other.

This is to solve a problem of the current internet: lack of intelligence and efficiency. The current internet has web links or URLs, which connect documents with each other. However, these documents are not raw data that is machine-readable. That’s when information silos happen. Imagine you move to another country one day and change your current location on your Facebook profile, your Linkedin profile will not be automatically updated without you having to log in and change that manually. This is not intelligent or efficient at all.

The vision of Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web is to be able to connect everything at the data level in the web, so once you change the information in one platform, the same information will automatically be changed everywhere. This can be achieved by storing all the data in a place called Solid.

Solid is the project in which Tim Berners-Lee wants to decentralize the Web without using blockchain. Tim believes that there are better options than blockchain technology to deploy services on the internet, as he worries that blockchain data are all open and public (maybe he can check these privacy networks). Other than the privacy concerns, there will be loopholes where a third party can still be able to track and analyze users’ data and activities on the Web, which is essentially the biggest problem of the Web today.

On the other hand, Tim thinks using blockchain is expensive as each transaction involved in the network will come with a cost, while the maintenance of the blockchain infrastructure also doesn’t always come cheap. And that is against Tim’s belief that the internet is for everyone, which was his fundamental goal when he created the World Wide Web.

According to his project Solid’s website, ‘Solid is a specification that lets people store their data securely in decentralized data stores called Pods. Pods are like secure personal web services for data. When data is stored in someone’s Pod, they control which people and applications can access it.’ Basically, the goal of Pod is true data ownership and increased privacy.

Somewhat Similar, Somewhat Different

As you can tell by now, both Web3 and Web 3.0 are attempting to create a new version of the Web, tempting to solve the problems of the current Web. However, their fundamental goals and approaches are different.

Web3, the decentralized and blockchain-based Web tries to empower the users by giving them back the power over their own identity and data through the use of blockchain technologies, while Web 3.0, the linked or semantic Web, tries to reuse and link machine-readable data across the Web to improve the intelligence and efficiency by using data interchange technologies.

Some Final Thoughts

Perhaps it doesn’t really matter what the differences are between Web3 and Web 3.0, they are both trying to build a better version of the internet, and both of them are still in process, which means ideas and technologies can still be altered and improved along the way.

Talking about technologies, at the end of the day, who really cares about the technologies being built behind an idea anyway (except the coders and engineers I guess)? Just like 99% of people have no idea how electricity, internet protocols, and encryption work today while they are using them every single day.