Web 3.0, is moving the world towards an internet where blockchain is going to provide the monetary frameworks to the online world which have been missing from it since the beginning. Bitcoin is the first live demo and it is already on its way to dethrone the traditional banking system as per its proponents. Talking to BlockPublisher, Co-Founder and CMO of Measure Protocol, Paul Neto said;

“While TCP/IP helped be the foundation of the internet, it was the enabling technology to share data online. Blockchain in a similar way will help be the layer of technology that enables accounting, accountability and the record of transaction for digital.”

In the 80s, TCP/IP defined a set of communication protocols for the internet that we are using today. It gave us the concrete set of rules using which messages travel in an internet bound product. Now, as we are nearing the end of the 2nd decade of the 21st century, blockchain has emerged on the tech scene as another “TCP/IP-worth” protocol but instead of redefining the communication protocols, it is going to provide the features transparency and accountability to the internet-based frameworks.

The lack of a financial system of operation within the internet has always bothered a lot of online businesses and products. In Web 1.0, which was the first internet the world ever witnessed, we saw the client-server architecture largely dominate where most of the data on the internet was provided by single parties like MSN, Yahoo etc.Users were the “clients” of these single “serving” parties. With Web 2.0, we witnessed the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc. as users gained equal opportunities to participate in internet-based ecosystems and produce content themselves that can be consumed by other users in the ecosystem. With Web 3.0, the monetary aspect of the internet changes as blockchain steps in. The following figure showcases some of the prime Web 3.0 alternatives of the traditional Web 2.0 apps.

Blockchain provides a complete monetary system to the online world & bitcoin is the biggest use-case in this regard. It provides a fabric of trust to the users in the form of an open-ledger. This ledger contains the record of all the happenings of a network and as a result, every transaction taking place on the network becomes visible to everyone. This happens due to the decentralized nature of a blockchain-based ecosystem where there is no single party controlling the network and instead, a collection of nodes maintains the entire network. The ledger is visible to everyone and as a result, the aspect of forgery by a central controlling party is taken out of the picture. Power is not concentrated in the hands of a single party as a result of the decentralized nature.

While bitcoin presented forward the first and the most potent use-case of blockchain technology back in 2009, various efforts have been made in order to find the technology’s use-cases in areas other than finance as well. As Paul said:

In the first generation it will [be] industries like banking, advertising and data that will primarily benefit from blockchain, though as things evolve, people won’t even be aware, or care, that they are using blockchain, or even cryptocurrencies for that matter. It will just be a matter of course.

Every technological innovation takes time to settle and find its niche. Blockchain is going through the same phase of getting more mature and finding it’s usage. It will be one of the prime components of the upcoming online financial frameworks with prospects that it provides in the form of transparency, immutability, trustlessness (as trust is not put in any third-party), its just a matter of time before we see it happen in the future.

Edited On: 3/3/2019 2:39 PM PKT