In the earliest portal period, users could only passively browse the text and pictures provided by the Internet, which constituted the "read-only" Web1.0 era. With the development of mobile Internet, Web2.0 evolved into "readable and writable", users could not only read the web content, but also publish their own content and modify the Internet content.
In the Web 2.0 era, the centralized approach has greatly reduced transaction costs and brought about incremental payoffs and network effects, thus giving rise to the platform economy. However, the problem is that although users are able to participate more deeply in the production of content, the corresponding rights do not fall into the hands of users.
Since most of the user's actions need to be mediated through the platform, the platform has de facto control over the user's information and access rights. For example, under the rule of "consent or no service", users often can only concede the rights of data subjects, and the platform can decide the life and death of the content at any time for violating the rules of the platform, and users have to agree to the collection of personal data or even excessive collection; and in the big data to kill ripe, information "feeding "and other algorithmic technical means, the user is also more in a disadvantageous passive position.
So, taking back the rights that should belong to users from monopolistic platforms has become a new demand of Web 3.0, which some experts described in a recent seminar as a kind of prescription by technology geeks for the contradictions accumulated in the Internet development over the decades.
Efficiency and Fairness
Unlike Web 2.0, which prioritizes efficiency, Web 3.0 mainly addresses the issue of fairness, using technical means, governance mechanisms, consensus algorithms and other decentralized methods to help Web 2.0 platform participants get back the rights they gave up and meet user needs.
Different voices believe that the decentralization emphasized in Web 3.0 is a pseudo-demand, and that most Internet users only care about a good experience, and have no desire to control their own data and participate in community governance.
We see that in the transition phase from Web2.0 to Web3.0, emerging platforms such as Roblox in overseas markets are moving towards Web3 from the direction of openness and co-construction, and are loved by young users. We believe that Web3.0 is in line with user needs, and will be gradually realized and accepted by the public as market education improves and the regulatory environment transforms.
At a deeper level, although the new technologies including blockchain have helped to improve industrial efficiency and make life more convenient, they have not directly affected the main social order and socio-economic relations. And many current distributed projects, which are actually just cloaked in decentralized technology, are not decentralized in the actual business practice process, so the questioning eventually returns to whether these new technologies boasting decentralization have the value of cost reduction and efficiency.
For many current projects based on Web3.0 technologies including, some believe that the criteria for judging whether a project is of high quality is the same, that is, whether it can reduce communication costs, improve the efficiency of cooperation and ultimately increase productivity. He admits that some of the current Web3.0 projects are not as good as the realization of the program with Web2.0, and if there is no productivity improvement through technological advances, Web3.0 will be reduced to a false proposition.
In the vision of Web3.0 interconnection and mutual trust, efficiency improvement is first reflected in the elimination of repetitive and redundant information, although currently still facing high infrastructure costs, but I tend to think that the future will be solved, we are more concerned about how to quickly reach consensus and reduce the cost of trust, and now many Web3.0 projects in order to improve efficiency, is semi-centralized, by everyone to select some high-weight nodes to improve the efficiency of transactions.
Web3.0 focus more on overcoming the problems of Web2.0, rather than the total negation of Web2.0, Web3.0 era in the platform model will still exist, but people will try to use some more underlying, more decentralized protocols to achieve the original platform functions.
In many cases, centralization is more efficient. For example, the digital RMB is not issued with blockchain, but it is guaranteed by national credit, so there is no need to add credit with blockchain, and the centralized issuance will also make it more efficient to use.
Web2.0 problems are more significant, the centralization of efficiency and user rights harm more areas will be the most valuable Web3.0 innovation direction. For example, the "creator economy", the centralized platform is too harsh to ensure the interests of creators, Web3.0 may be a good alternative.
How the Web3.0 economy evolves
Although Web3.0 has been highly valued by the capital market, but compared to Web2.0 economy is still relatively small. Li Zhenhua analysis points out that as Web3.0 consumer projects continue to incubate, the phenomenal products on the consumer side are the key to Web3.0 achieving a mass breakthrough circle, and capital and market participants are looking for a new "narrative", such as Angry Birds in GameFi, Tinder in SocialFi, and so on.
In the current transition phase, there will not be a particularly iconic event, and the transition process will take place in a subtle, evolutionary manner.
For example, the transfer of content creation platforms and game platforms to Web 3.0, in a way that the ownership of the value of the content is returned to the users, and the right to profit in the process of the content being used is also gradually returned to the users. In this process, the profit distribution rules are made by the platform and black-boxed, and gradually transformed into pre-agreed and non-tamperable between the platform and users through smart contract technology. In the user's perception, the company and the product have not changed, but the actual migration from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 has been completed.
However, it is worth noting that Web3.0 is also creating new business models catalyzed by tools such as smart contracts, NFT and DAO.
For example, Axie Infinity, a meta-universe game, empowers game pets with NFT so that they have trading and collecting value. Players can invest corresponding resources to cultivate their pets through breeding, fighting, and reproduction to increase their corresponding NFT value, and eventually trade on the blockchain for this.
Through these transformations, Axie Infinity has turned from a simple game into a P2E (Play to Earn) project, and a series of X2E model metaverse products such as StepN's M2E (Move to Earn) have emerged.
At the same time, in some other traditional business integration, the changes brought by Web3.0 appear to be more "violent", such as the fastest growing Web3.0 DeFi (decentralized finance) field.
The so-called DeFi refers to the financial application ecosystem built on the blockchain, with the goal of developing and operating a financial system without intermediaries such as banks, payment service providers, and investment funds in a decentralized manner, and providing all types of financial services on a transparent blockchain network.
The financial industry itself has long been engaged by centralized financial institutions due to its high requirements for risk control and other requirements, but due to its own profitability and risk control objectives, people will face higher barriers to accessing financial services, and the accessibility of financial services will be limited. In addition, when providing financial services, centralized financial institutions usually require users to provide a large amount of data and information, which poses a potential threat to users' privacy and personal information security.
In DeFi's operation mechanism, users pledge certain collateral to the blockchain to trigger the relevant smart contract, and then users can enjoy financial services through the set agreement, which is free from the influence of centralized institutions and avoids both risks, while this efficiency improvement in time and cost is especially advantageous in cross-border cross-institutional financial services.
Although blockchain-based decentralized technology is a technology well worth promoting, it is only one of the optional technologies, and there is no need to overstate its role in changing the financial order or economic order.
And in the innovation of the financial industry, DeFi practice is difficult to bring big changes to the order logic of the real economy in the short term. Taking the most frequent meta-universe direction under Web3.0 as an example, the current meta-universe that can reduce costs and increase efficiency is often in the industrial, especially manufacturing business scenarios, which do not have great asset exchange, and still need to wait until the digital transformation develops to a higher stage, until in the industrial Internet, smart manufacturing, digital twin and other propositions are more mature in their development, and the main production life of society is transferred to the digital world, DeFi's demand will only rise.