What Is Web3?
Web3 is a social and technical movement to decentralised social media and online communities.
Web 2.0 led to the concentration of power to few Silicon Valley based social media conglomerates, like Facebook and Twitter. Many creators, users and governments are dissatisfied these companies, as they see them executing profit sharing and censorship powers unfairly.
Web3 movement aims to address this issue with user owned content. The content is usually digital content and can be pictures, posts, social media profiles or video game assets.
The content is not siloed, truly owned by the user, and can be transferred across different services and protocols. The profit share is made more fair the users, not the corporation owners, have more negotiation power. This is achieved using open source, blockchains, open protocols, public key cryptography and token based governance.
Web3 protocols are funded using decentralised finance instead of private venture capital. Web3 protocols aim to fair token distribution so that users would own the largest share of protocol control and revenues.
Popular Web3 protocols and projects include e.g.
Lens protocol (social media)
Farcast (social media)
Paradise Tycoon (mobile game with NFTs)
Phaver (Reddit for Web3)
Sandbox (metaverse game)
Web3 has also other meanings
Historically, the technical term web3 referred to the three original decentralised technologies that were visioned when Ethereum launched: Ethereum, shh, and bzz.
Web3 foundation is the name of the Swiss non-profit that launched Polkadot blockchain.
See also