In software development we tend to continuously update to the latest version. It keeps you up to date with the current state of development, it can provide you with new features or better performance. But it can also lead to frustration when the process is not as smooth as expected and brings completely new challenges which you did not have before.
As we experience this in our daily work with moving from monoliths to microservices, from server to server-less, from SPAs to SSG, an update is currently also happening within the web itself. There is now a new “major version” called Web3.
At this point it is getting complicated. What can we expect from this update? New features, bug fixes, breaking changes? As there is no such thing as a CHANGELOG.md for the Web itself, a short summary reads like this:
Web3 promises to give users the full ownership over their content, data and all other assets they possibly could own… by utilizing blockchain technology.
What we need to understand here first is that this “update” is not primarily technology-driven. It is more about people starting to avoid trusting big companies, banks or even countries. They aim for a system which is decentralized, transparent and trustless. And blockchain as the technology can provide this. It is even proving its concept since 2009 as the key technology behind Bitcoin. So does Ethereum, which even powers applications (dApps) running worldwide on a decentralized network.
So does this mean we should migrate all our customers applications to some blockchain and we are done? Of course not. Before even suggesting this, we need to clarify the WHY first. Jumping on the hype train is easy, making something valuable out of it is not. And finally, we have to look into the HOW and start learning what it means to develop for a decentralized web.
The Web3 is not just a new version you simply upgrade to. It is a new paradigm where people and machines can interact with data or property without the need of a third party in the middle. The discussions about Web3 and blockchain in general will remain controversial until we see more reasonable use cases. In the meantime we should keep our minds open for the things to come.
