Tech, crypto firms, and venture capitalists have recently developed a jargon obsession: Web3. It’s now a common topic of conversation, and until you include it in your Twitter bio, you aren’t taking the future seriously.

It serves as a catch-all phrase for various concepts that all aim to do away with the major online middlemen. Today, using the Internet doesn’t require signing into services like Facebook, Google, or Twitter.

Consider it like this: Web 1.0 was the term used to describe the early 1990s Internet. There weren’t many effective ways to navigate the web other than visiting your friend’s GeoCities page, which was considered as a means to democratize access to knowledge. It was quite unorganized.

Then, beginning in the mid-2000s, came Web 2.0. By facilitating connections and online transactions, platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have emerged to bring order to the Internet. According to critics, those firms grew too powerful over time.

The goal of Web3 is to reclaim some of the power.

The concept of a new type of Internet service built using decentralized blockchains – the shared ledger systems used by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether – is known as Web3. The more a system is centralized, the more it yields uneven results.

A few fundamental ideas serve as the guiding principles of Web3:

Decentralization: With Web3, ownership of data is divided among its creators and users rather than being controlled and owned by sizable portions of the Internet.
Equal access: Everyone has equal access to engage in Web3 and nobody is excluded because it is permissionless.
Doing away with outdated infrastructure: With native payments, Web3 omits outdated infrastructure of traditional banks and payment processors and uses cryptocurrencies for online purchases and payments.
Independent operations: Web3 runs without the use of third parties and instead, it makes use of incentives and economic principles.