Since the World Wide Web hit the mainstream in 1994, we’ve seen the network expand to encompass almost every aspect of human life. The underlying infrastructure of the Internet and the services built on top of it are interdependent, one informing the other as new use cases and technologies arise. There have been two clear generations in the services and structure of the web thus far, but today we are moving into a third. In this article we will look at what characterized Web 1.0 & 2.0 and what may characterize Web 3.0. We will then look at the storage technologies that are likely to form its backbone: the decentralized storage network IPFS and it’s incentive platform Filecoin, and Swarm, an emerging Ethereum oriented storage platform that uses IPFS.



Both Juan Benet of Protocol Labs and Viktor Trón of the Swarm team consulted on this piece. For follow up, I recommend the Swarm orange paper “ Swap, Swear and Swindle”, this talk from the Swarm team, the IPFS white paper, as well as this talk by Juan. The aim of this article is to serve as an introduction to those resources.