Why is web3 hot?
Anyone following the tech world will have heard the term over and over again: web3. In past blogs, we’ve touched on what this means — what set of technologies and how this is viewed as different from web2 and web1. But why?
If you have used any of the web3 apps, such as a decentralized exchange, staking site or lending site, you’ll be left very unimpressed for most part. The experience is slow. If you use Eth, the fees are super high. The time to confirm a transaction exceeds a minute. The instructions are complicated. The user interfaces are such that only a mother could love. Yep — it’s pretty awful to a large extent.
And therein lies much of the opportunity. You can imagine a similar experience such as how the Web1 companies were awful in many ways. Buying a CD could take twenty minutes of slow downloads, with frequent failures — vs. an mp3 download from our phone in under a second today. We can start to see the notion of a wallet controlling much of our back end data as fundamental to our identity across not only financial sites, but potentially too commerce site, content sites, mobility sites and more.
There are lots of security concerns here — such as what happens when your wallet keys are lost or stolen? Without recovery mechanisms — how is this tolerated. Undoubtedly, there are solutions which will emerge in time, even though it will be bumpy. And, this is why people are excited. Many of the Web1 companies that managed to grab land in the 90s are still around, even as they dramatically changed their business models to accommodate the new technologies: Amazon, Google, NetFlix, Ebay, PayPal… Even earlier companies that embraced the internet such Microsoft and Cisco have thrived.
And, if we believe there is a Web4 of some sort, we can image that a legacy company as well as new entrants will embrace that, as so many have the Web2 wave — most noticeably with Apple’s innovation and lead within the new front end mobility interfaces.
So, while today’s web3 experience may be lacking…stay tuned!
