Web2 vs Web3: A Study
#CoinDCXpathbreaker
There is a war brewing in the digital space! A war for dominance and ultimate supremacy. The war is being fought for you, your mind, your attention and your entire existence. If you haven’t noticed, this is the time to wake up and smell the coffee ☕️
I am talking about the war between Web2 & Web3
image source: Cnet
Facebook has even gone ahead and changed their entire branding to Meta and they have already started opening doors to their new Meta physical stores. This is how GARGANTUAN 🦍 the Metaverse experience will be, and this is all being made possible through the power of Web3
I honestly feel that the Metaverse will be a part of singular structure and every virtual ecosystem will provide an unique experience of its own. Visualise it as going to different cities in the real World and experiencing the uniqueness of their culture, but at the end they all remain a part of Earth. Jumping from one game to another will give the feels of teleportation… The Metaverse will evolve from a place in time and extend beyond the traditional boundaries we are currently used to.
Economies going digital- The whole Decentralised economy will also bring in a new era of micro-transactions, but in a more sophisticated way. Currently a few games on the Playstation already have micro-transactions in place, where players can buy certain upgrades through real-world fiat currency. In the Metaverse it will be different, users will have their crypto wallet perpetually connected to their digital avatar, and go on a shopping spree within a digital simulation or they can just enter into a Metaverse FPS game environment and buy tons of ammunition, protective gears and limited-edition weapons to knock-out their opponent cold. All this will be done not through Fiat currency, but through the digital ecosystems native token.
This is absolutely going to be the new era of gaming and with gaming consoles becoming more powerful, I cannot wait to see what we are served with…The most insane level of gaming virtualisation & the coming together of the internet, with Web3 acting as the ultimate bridge.
Superiority of Web3 over Web 2
Ownership lies with the owners
Like I have mentioned above, every social media platform in existence owns their users data and thus have the power to ban, mute or terminate any account according to their own judgement. This will be the total opposite in the Web3 ecosystem because creators will fully own their content and the content will reside on the blockchain.
Taking the example of Twitch streamers in Russia, who were using the platform for their regular income. The war situation between Russia & Ukraine, as well as the escalation of political tension between Russia & other nations, led Twitchto take a stand and block off all payments to Russian streamers indefinitely. An absolute destruction of a creator economy. One wrong move by a government, and the price is being paid by the citizens of the country. This situation would never arise if the creator platform was decentralised and hosted on a blockchain. Centralisation of power will always yield bad results.
Payment system: There have been numerous instances where PayPal has banned accounts of users for no major violations. Private banks transfer funds of user only after collecting a truck load of customer data, Data leaks are a common occurrence with major banking players now, also we have witnessed a surge 📈 in the number of credit card information hacks which has now become widespread and notorious within the payment industry. Again, you & your information is FOR SALE!
All of the above drawbacks are now being eliminated through the whole transition from Web2 to Web3. Crypto has always been available 24x7, your money is in your power and you don’t have to answer ridiculous question on transfer of your own funds within crypto. There is complete elimination of the middleman here, just a Sender-Receiver and their corresponding wallet addresses is all that is needed to execute transactions.
Play-2-Earn (P2E)
Through the rise of the Web3 ecosystems, we have also got to witness the dawn of an absolutely new income stream in the form of P2E (Play-to-Earn). Who would have thought 5 years back, that playing video games can actually earn you a handsome income? Not me at least.
Take the example of a project like Star Atlas — it has propelled the P2E space into something else altogether, it has enabled players to earn a living by playing the game. Question yourself on how the same model would have been possible on Web2, when the entire game platform, the game itself & other developments are in control of a single entity.In present times, we as users are still paying money to play games and are also being served with intrusive advertisements. Centralisation = Corporate Greed.
Network security: Remember, very recently, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger & Whatsapp all suffered a outage & downtime, resulting in Facebook (now Meta) losing Millions in stock value? This happened because of the servers being centralised and that caused a ripple effect to all the other services of Facebook.
In the same context, servers of big player apps, banking apps, centralised cloud servers; all could go down and affect user in multiple ways, but Web3 servers going down have very little chances, as they have been structured on a decentralized network mesh with thousands of computers acting as their backend support.
Key-Takeaway
Web3 is in at the very nascent stages of its development and there is a lot of room for improvement at every stage. We can talk about this topic and it’s offerings at length — the fact about the cutting-edge virtual world we will get to experience through the Metaverse, but then, we also have to possess the most bleeding-edge hardware to stream that kind of reality directly in front of us. These hardware will be out-of-reach for the masses economically while it’s still young. This is an Entry Barrier.
When I have stressed so much fact on Gaming, we should also factor in gameplay and the additional requirement of more resource intensive hardware such as Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. VR headsets will be an absolute must to actually dive into the immersion of the grandeur that the Metaverse space has to offer. To sum it up, all of the enabling technology does exists, there is a complete framework in place, but there is a lot left to achieve in terms of flawless execution. Imagine Web3 now being at the Dial-up Internet phase.
Image source: https://networkencyclopedia.com/dial-up-line/
We are yet to witness broadband internet → Fiber Internet & the satellite 🛰 era
In the context of Web3, we have to start looking beyond the Metaverse, there are multitude of other things that Web3 has to offer, everything from
- Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs)
- Artist being able to host their music on the blockchain through projects like Audius
- DeFi protocols breaking traditional finance boundaries
- DAOs changing the landscape of employment
- virtual lands & shopping malls being built in the metaverse
- P2E gaming and so much more.
This is the most exciting time for investors & developers alike, who are early-adopters of this transition phase and have taken notice of the massive potential the next level of internet has to offer. If you invest your time in researching upcoming projects, tokenomics, use-case and different type of blockchains, you will be taken a back on how future forward the decentralised internet is and what an opportunity it will be in the coming years. The entire space is still very raw and untapped.
A huge thank you to CoinDCX for giving me this opportunity to write such a detailed report and be a part of the #CoinDCXpathbreaker program, enabling me to share such knowledge with everyone in the crypto space.
