Helium is a wifi network, owned by everyone and powered by cryptocurrency. You sign up, plug a device that plugs into your router, and offer to share your excess or unused WiFi capacity with other people. What you get in return are Helium crypto tokens, the more your personal hotspot is used, the more Helium tokens you earn, and these can be used for accessing Wi-Fi services elsewhere. Helium, which calls itself ‘the people’s network’, decentralizes Wi-Fi, a service traditionally provided only by large multi-billon dollar telecom and fibre companies.

Arcade City is a decentralized taxi service, built in Austin by an ex-Uber driver, who also happened to be a software engineer. Fed up with what he thought was the unfair treatment of its drivers, he created this to take on his ex-employer. Built on the blockchain and powered by digital cryptocurrency, it was designed to be owned by a cooperative of drivers, rather than one central entity. An Israeli startup called La Zooz’ is attempting to do the same by ‘using blockchain technology to create a self-managed ride-sharing and car-pooling platform, by connecting drivers with empty seats and would-be passengers in real time, without any intermediary, with the service not owned by the app founders, but the community of users. The decentralized service rewards the drivers with tokens called Zooz that they can use when they want a ride from someone else in the community.’

Axie Infinity is a video game, very popular in Asia, especially in the Phillippines. If you crack some in-game goals, you get rewarded with NFTs and crypto coins, which can be redeemed for real money. Players ‘build’ the game as they go along, ‘breeding’ characters called Axies, which can battle other players’ Axies in the game. Players can also buy virtual territory in NFT form and earn tradeable token money called SLP. Sometimes referred to ‘Pokemon on the Blockchain’, there are Filipinos who make a living only from playing the game. These decentralized ‘play-to-earn’ games have created a revolution in the world of gaming. 

The above are real world examples of what people vaguely refer to as Web3. While some of them (especially the taxi services) are yet to take off, the common theme is clear: they are decentralized, owned by the community, sit on the blockchain, and are powered by cryptocurrency. A lot has been written about Web3, and it has become an elastic term being used for anything: pure crypto plays used it to make them sound more respectable, minting NFTs of bored mammals are seen to be Web3 ideas, so is buying virtual land or doing fashion shows in the ‘metaverse’.

Yes, Web3 is all of this, but it is much more. Web 1.0 was about reading static content pages on MSN, Yahoo or AOL, and started in the 1990s. Web 2.0 burst forth in 2005 with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like and is about people creating and posting their own content, going beyond just passively reading it. Web3 (for some reason using 3.0 is considered unfashionable) goes beyond where you not only actively participate, but also own and build pieces of it through ownership tokens and blockchain technologies, thus distributing ownership away from the highly centralized ownership of Web 2.0. So, if Web 1.0 was about Read, Web 2.0 is Read and Write, Web3 will be about Read, Write and Own. As crypto investor Li Jin and writer Katie Parrott said: “If the pre-internet/web1 era favored publishers, and the web2 era favored the platforms, the next generation of innovations — collectively known as web3 — is all about tilting the scales of power and ownership back toward creators and users.”Web3 has ascended the hype curve rapidly, with an estimated venture capital inflow of $27bn in 2021 alone, Facebook rechristening itself Meta, and Jack Dorsey declaring his intent by renaming his company Square to Block. If I was to abstract beyond the hype, I believe that Web3 is a new business model: much like Web1 was advertising led, and Web2 data monetization led, Web3 will be led by peer-to-peer value exchange and ownership. Web3 is open, built with open-source software built by an open community of developers; it is trustless, where transactions and interactions can happen without requiring an trusted central authority; it is permissionless, where you do not need the consent of a controlling entity like Facebook or Google to engage; it is ubiquitous, with the internet available everywhere and to everyone, even to machines; and, finally, it is owned, where users participate as equals in the governance and ownership through crypto-tokens, as proof-of-stake. In a sense, it is like going back to the past – to the early era of human settlements, with all transactions happening peer-to-peer, easy trust between everyone, and locally minted and trusted currency. In an ideal world, blockchains are providing the decentralized, trusted foundation of this new old world, and Web3 is the business model driving it.