It’s too early. To predict all the implications of the recent Ethereum blockchain integration, it certainly addresses the most frequent (and valid) criticism of Web 3 regarding excessive power consumption. Critics may still find a new reason to oppose ETH, but my hope is that this merger will lead to something else: it will give us a chance to combine what’s great about web 2.0 with what’s so exciting about web3.
There seems to be a growing rift in Silicon Valley, where the traditional Web 2.0 industry and the growing Web 3 ecosystem seem to be at odds with each other. And trapped somewhere in the middle are startups.
I am active in all three groups, and much of this controversy is based on the claims of VCs and other non-constructive evangelicals. The constant celebrity promotions of NFT drops have contributed to the general perception that Web3 is a Ponzi scheme. In fact, NFTs are only a small part of the Web3 ecosystem, and in my view, not even very interesting or transformative.
While Web 2.0 and Web3 may seem incompatible, I believe it’s best to see technologies like blockchain and ETH as back-end solutions to the operational challenges that all companies face. Similarly, Web3 advocates must recognize that the maturity of Web 2.0 makes it essential for many major use cases.
Despite the great potential of Web3, it is still very easy to develop a Web 2.0 application simply because the ecosystem is mature and enjoys a large and rich developer community.
Let’s look at a couple of examples of what each side contributes:
From the Web 3: The Emerging Revolution in Open Source
To catch what’s happening now in Web 3 development, we have to go back to before the Web 2.0 era.
During the dot-com boom, there was a lot of hype around open source, Linux, and hot companies like Red Hat. While very few consumers continue to install Linux as their operating system, this buzz has contributed to the importance of the same. In the background, with few people noticing, Linux quickly became the operating system for running the back-end servers of 96.5% of the top million web domains.
