Is Web3 (still) the Internet of the Future?

While some Web 2.0 businesses are already transforming their infrastructure by adding Web 3.0 elements, most ‘traditional’ internet-based companies and developers are still unaware of the whole Web 3.0 trend and how it can upgrade nearly any business.

In this article, we thoroughly explain the differences between the web generations and why Web 3.0 is often called the internet of the future. We’ll answer the questions of what exactly is hampering the wide Web 3.0 adoption and how to get into the Web3 world easily and quickly.

Web Generations Explained

Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0

Web 1.0 is the internet of the ’90s. Lots of articles and pages are linked together into one web. The only thing you could do was just to read these articles. That was the ultimate experience you could have.

Web 2.0 is a step ahead, and we assume you know a lot about Web 2.0. It’s the internet you mostly use today. You interact with thousands of web pages, and social networks; you consume and create content yourself. If you are a web developer, you mostly create the structure of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a ‘read-write’ web, while the previous Web 1.0 is ‘read-only.’ That makes sense, right?

In addition to that, advertising is a vast sector of Web 2.0 revenues. Partially, it shapes the logic of the current internet as a whole. Every page wants to grab your attention.

Web 2.0 is a centralized, mostly non-anonymous structure. It was designed to safeguard users from ‘harmful’ content, but as we can often see, it's very hard to draw the line.

Web 3.0 And Why It’s So Cool

Web 3.0 is a network of smart contracts, decentralized apps, and organizations. Think of it more as a technological movement that revolutionizes the way our internet works.

You can access Web 3.0 through special browser extensions, such as Brave, Osiris, etc. Some Web 3.0 apps can also be accessed from the traditional internet.

Decentralization is the main strength of Web 3.0. No institution or government is regulating Web 3.0. Another huge advantage of Web 3.0 is anonymity. Most of the time, Web3 services won't collect any data about you. Without an extensive  ‘portfolio’ of every person, targeted advertising will fade away on the internet of the future.

With the growth of Web 3.0, many Web 2.0 businesses are transforming some parts of their infrastructures to keep up with the newer standards.

What is hampering Web3 adoption?

However, when it comes to Web 3.0, not everything is as smooth as you may expect.

Not user-friendly

The ecosystem of Web 3.0 is still not very user-friendly, which might scare off many newcomers, both users and developers.

For example, if you run your application on Ethereum mainnet, you may know that the gas prices are unpredictable and mostly very high. Every time you make a transaction, you basically overpay. That’s why many Web3 app developers build ways to switch to efficient Layer2 solutions. However, from the UI/UX point of view, the whole process is usually very convoluted. Setting up a wallet, connecting it to another chain, transaction signing,, bridging and many other complicated things can take a lot of effort and time for a non-tech savvy user to learn.

Time-costly

Since the Web3 space is fairly new, building an application requires lots of developer time.

Think about how long it took to build a website in the 2000’s. A few months? And how long does it take now, in 2022?

Thanks to the hundreds of website constructors that provide multiple layers of abstraction, it's a matter of hours. Now you don’t even need to code to build your website. Say it to a web developer from the past, and they wouldn’t believe you!

Lack of tools & education

As a developer, you’ve probably already encountered the absence of reliable tools in the Web3 space.

Since the industry moves at unprecedented speeds, you should have a consistent toolkit that allows you to prototype ideas quickly and with frequent changes in mind. No one wants to build a whole new app with every minor network upgrade.

Not only is it hard to find the right toolkit, but also learning about Web3 is not an easy task. Since the industry is pretty new, there are not a lot of educational platforms on the radar that offer extensive Web3 education.

The educational wave in Web3 is only just on the rise. Just recently, Web3 University started its new course to learn the fundamentals of Web3 development. Also, Coursera offers a few courses on Web3.

Solution?

Since the above-described problems have been known for some time, there is a couple of companies that are trying to facilitate Web3 development through truly innovative solutions. In this article, we’ll take a look at three of them.

Biconomy

Biconomy — is a platform for Web3 developers that takes care of multi-chain transactions infrastructure. It is being described as a ‘Next-Gen Multichain Relayer Protocol’ with the goal of making Web3 development easier. Currently, there are 2.1m unique users on the platform and 20.1M transactions.

Among other investors, Biconomy is backed by Binance and Coinbase, so there shouldn’t be questions about its reliability.

The platform provides various Plug-n-play APIs to seamlessly integrate your dApp and ‘not break things’.

There are several key features that Biconomy provides:

• Onboarding even without being crypto proficient — just using Javascript SDK, npm or CDN
• Free gasless transactions
• Simple & fast user onboarding to Layer 2
• Pay gas in your favorite ERC20 token
• Instant cross-chain transactions between chains
• Always pay the correct gas fees and never overspend again
• No need to manually change RPC to connect and switch to L2s and EVM-compatible chains

Apart from that, Biconomy describes itself as a blockchain and platform agnostic, supporting the always-growing number of chains.

Etherspot

The team behind the Pillar Wallet has created Etherspot, an all-in-one, EVM-compatible platform that accelerates ideas and their execution.

Etherspot solves nearly all the problems that were described in the previous chapter. In fact, this is the only SDK you need to interact with the Ethereum multiverse quickly with minimal effort and cost. It literally makes Ethereum application development painless by easily deploying their SDK, you no longer have to re-invent the wheel when building.

Here is a short overview of the fundamental features of Etherspot:

• Extremely fast app prototyping — hours instead of months

• Intelligent Smart Contract Management — automatically or manually

• Smart Contracts are owned by your application accounts and ensure that assets remain on-chain and secured

• Multichain Access — use one or all the chains simultaneously with the same address for greater flexibility and speed

• Off-chain Payment Hubs & Bridges for unlimited amounts

• Off-chain P2P transactions directly and at no cost

• Cross-chain messaging (for cross-chain swap and streaming)

• Meta-transactions (pay gas in any token)

• Save time and money with Transaction batching

• Guaranteed tx confirmations ensured by relayers

• Full NFT support

• Prototype & develop quickly with the ready-to-go, disposable playground, which allows technical teams to test-drive their ideas and products

• Use their Discord faucet for test tokens

• Extensive documentation by the Etherspot engineers and great community support

  
  

Currently, Etherspot gives developers the freedom to use the following chains:

1. Ethereum Mainnet
2. Polygon
3. Gnosis Chain
4. Binance Smart Chain
5. Fuse
6. Phantom
7. Moonbeam
8. Aurora
9. Avalanche
10. Arbitrum
11. Optimism
12. Celo

With Etherspot, you, as a developer or business owner, can focus on the most important thing — building your product and jack in insane functionality with their SDK.

Sequence

Sequence is claimed to be ‘the smartest Web3 wallet’. It is a non-custodial and user-friendly wallet with multi-chain support.

What Sequence can do:

• Connect to Ethereum + EVM Chains
• Swap, trade, and bridge in the wallet
• Buy crypto with credit or debit
• Built-in smart security keeps your crypto safe
• Full NFT support
• Meta-transactions: users can pay for gas in any token
• Save time and money with batched transactions
• Multi-key security

Conclusion

As you can see, there are quite a few obstacles that the internet of the future must overcome before becoming widely used and appreciated.

Since Web 3.0 is still in its early stages of development, it has lower accessibility than the regular Internet. Your business can still gain a massive competitive advantage by simply being the first.