What is the web 3.0 or Metaverse?

 

What is the web 3.0 or Metaverse?

If you've seen the sci-fi movie The Matrix, you might be familiar with the concept of virtual reality in the form of the Metaverse, which consists of a myriad of worlds where people can interact and play games with each other and share ideas. But why have we only heard about it and not experienced it yet? This article explains what web 3.0 or the Metaverse is and why we should expect to see it soon!

 

The internet as we know it today

Web 1.0 was all about – computers linked together to share information and collaborate on projects that involved mainly text and spreadsheet files; not much else besides HTML and some basic programming language knowledge (for those who wanted to do it themselves). The 90s was when search engines began popping up everywhere, along with ways to send messages through email, chat programs, etc. In recent years, we've seen how social media has taken over – creating entire virtual communities of people who have never met face-to-face but feel like they know each other quite well.

 

Blockchain technology

The Blockchain is a digital ledger technology that almost any kind of data – representing financial records, legal contracts and intellectual property, among many other things – in a safe, secure and transparent way. Blockchains' decentralized (or distributed) nature makes them resistant to data modification. And blockchain technologies also enable smart contracts, where rules are programmed into digital agreements to execute automatically when certain conditions are met. These rules could represent anything from payments to transferring ownership rights in physical assets like cars and houses . . . It essentially allows for greater transparency and trust in business transactions.

 

How to understand Blockchain

There are many articles on Blockchain, but there is not enough clarity about what it does and how it works. Though its origins lie in providing an official bitcoin transaction database, an immutable ledger for recording transactions for all time, Blockchain has come to mean so much more than that today, with dozens of organizations developing variants of it across industries from finance to logistics to entertainment. Blockchain technology can be permissioned (private) and permissionless (public). You could think of permissioned blockchains as a list of records locked behind a firewall which everyone in your organization can see. Still, only authorized people can change or add to that list, just like today's traditional corporate databases.

 

The future of decentralization

The Internet and World Wide Web have evolved significantly over time, but despite all their changes, one thing hasn't changed at all: centralization. In fact, as of 2016, it can be argued that centralization has never been stronger due to market trends and censorship efforts worldwide. For example, with more countries regulating content individually, traditional applications like Facebook, Google and YouTube are now blocked in China — a country with 1 billion active internet users (20% of global internet users). More than just censoring certain pieces of information, though, centralization can lead to abuse of power with unprecedented control over information flows and monetary transactions within a country or globally.