Okay it'll be a shame if no one saw through that beautiful double entendre in the headline and sub copy.
This is the part in the movie where there's a fight or someone is running and then the frame pauses as a voice goes: "Yep, that's me. You're wondering how I got here. Hi, I'm Jumoke and this is how it all started" .
Then a big rewind follows and we all have to catch the story from the beginning.
In the 'beningin'
Yep that's Web3, you're probably wondering what it is or how it got here. So let's take it back to how it all started. In the late 90s a big technological development had arrived, called the dot com bubble. It was the era of websites, webpages, businesses and organisations going onto the internet for the first time! A key turning point for global technology, of course, until the bubble burst in the early 2000s when almost everyone had a website and the people who were gatekeeping web technology lost a bit of their pride, dignity, and big fat wads of dollars.
That dot com thingy in the late 90s to early 2000s is called Web1, or more nerdily, Web 1.0. The internet was born, celebrated, and everyone moved on. Damn.
The second coming
The 2010s were a really good number of years because this is where the next step in web technology advancement began. In web1, people built websites to store data. That was it. Web2 took it further and not only stored data but also shared it as well with the user. It was incredible--but that wasn't even what web2 was about.
You see, storing and sharing web data with the user on the other end doesn't pay the bills. Selling the information you have about your network or collective number of users, is what pays the bills.
Companies like Google and Facebook understood this because businesses saw that more and more people started using search engines and social networks to connect with people and find information. This meant their eyes were leaving TVs and Billboards to interact with screens and keyboards. (Haha, a rhyme!)
Thus, digital advertising was born! The peak of web2.
With more and more websites providing content on their platforms, they too wanted a piece of the pie. How? Content marketing! It is a way to draw eyes to your business and sell your services, using educational, informative or entertaining content. It's also a great way to sell ad space to Google because if your website has more eyes it means it can make you more money.
To buttress this point, let us take a look at YouTube. The second most used search engine in the world, where people search for information through published video content. You get it now?
The highlights of web2.0 were:
Direct advertising on search and social sites.
Indirect advertising through content distribution or publishing networks e.g YouTube and your website.
Now the pitfall of web2 is that while it sells your data to advertisers, you never stop getting ads from brands and this means if you use these services often you may be inclined to go premium, or use an ad blocker--which if you're using Chrome, Google will frustrate you haha.
But that's the third facet of web2. Making money by making you go premium, however it is unsuccessful because people seem to have developed a strong amount of patience to wade through the 5 seconds of horror, before they use all their might like they have all six infinity stones and, press SKIP AD.
Third time's the charm, innit?
*Drumroll*
I have a special place in my heart for sister 'rona. She fast tracked humanity into quicker tech advancement when, people got bored of the same old ways things were done, and actually started poking holes into all the systems we are currently weaved into with and without our knowledge.
One bottle for you my dear.
The concerns people had with web2, (which I personally hold no opinion on for the sake of the article) were that;
Privacy is a myth
Your data is a commodity sold to the highest bidder, literally
You are bound by whatever the platform you're using, tells you
You never ever do read the T&C (lol, do you ever?)
To solve this, we decided to bring back an old technology from our internet daddy, Satoshi Nakamoto, into view. Satoshi (him/her/they, this isn't woke bullshit, we really don't know if it's a man, woman or group who) created what we call the Bitcoin, using a technology called blockchains.
Blockchains are platforms that allow you to build websites, apps, software, frameworks, and tools where anyone who has access to it can see everything that's going on. Everything. This concept of transparency and access is called decentralization--everyone has a say should it come to where you have to make a vote. So one body is not the judge, jury and executioner.
So in 2020, people started paying more attention to crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi), which by default are built on blockchain technology. This then led to what we now have come to know as Web3. (If you're not on Twitter or Reddit it's kinda hard to know what's going on, haha I'm sorry)
So Web3 is the new internet where its evangelists believe that decentralization will allow institutions, companies, finance houses, schools, governments and even homes to be run more efficiently. While there are loopholes to these theories, what we cannot dispute however is the fact that Web3 solves a lot of problems.
Finance & Payments = DeFi Apps and cryptocurrencies
Government/governance = DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Communities, remember when I said everyone has a say should it come to a vote?)
Transactions and deals = Smart contracts
Travel, housing, immersive entertainment = The metaverse
Collectibles, memes, art, music = NFTs
Beautiful isn't it? Yeah but here's the problem. Web3 is less than 5 years old, meaning it's still in its early stages so it's as wobbly as many projects can get. So now do you understand the double entendre?
However, here's the good news: you're early. Wagmi.
Did you like this? Share it!
Lmao, Kalu has hacked the comic... A new style is coming 💀💀. Simple. Historical. &. Fun💉
My Web2 conservative remains, but I guess we are in the early days and anything.
3098840253 do the rest🍴.