Web3 event series
Inviting Web3 enthusiasts worldwide to discover how they can leverage the power of the Internet Computer Protocol, the ICPCC event targets more than 2,000 attendees. The event, where the best use cases of ICP will come to the fore, focuses on building a more interconnected and user-friendly decentralized ecosystem.
Local meetups with ICP influencers, founders, and investors will feature several key opinion leaders from the crypto world. These include MC Blockchain Boy, William Laurent, Jerry Banfield, Blockchain Pill, Aaron Bremser and The Swop.
The ICPCC team believes people will derive real-world value from Web3, even if they don’t know what a token or decentralization is. Its move to a community-focused DAO structure complements ICPCC’s vision for a more user-friendly and accessible future.
Web3 events are at the forefront of advancing a more user-friendly and interconnected decentralized ecosystem, showcasing a progressive stance on governance and community involvement. All blockchain-based events herald a future where decentralization is integrated into everyday digital experiences and where Web3 is accessible to everyone.
Crypto, however, is just the tip of the spear. The underlying technology, blockchain, is what’s called a “distributed ledger” — a database hosted by a network of computers instead of a single server — that offers users an immutable and transparent way to store information. Blockchain is now being deployed to new ends: for instance, to create “digital deed” ownership records of unique digital objects — or nonfungible tokens. NFTs have exploded in 2022, conjuring a $41 billion market seemingly out of thin air. Beeple, for example, caused a sensation last year when an NFT of his artwork sold for $69 million at Christie’s. Even more esoteric cousins, such as DAOs, or “decentralized autonomous organizations,” operate like headless corporations: They raise and spend money, but all decisions are voted on by members and executed by encoded rules. One DAO recently raised $47 million in an attempt to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution. Advocates of DeFi (or “decentralized finance,” which aims to remake the global financial system) are lobbying Congress and pitching a future without banks.
The totality of these efforts is called “Web3.” The moniker is a convenient shorthand for the project of rewiring how the web works, using blockchain to change how information is stored, shared, and owned. In theory, a blockchain-based web could shatter the monopolies on who controls information, who makes money, and even how networks and corporations work. Advocates argue that Web3 will create new economies, new classes of products, and new services online; that it will return democracy to the web; and that is going to define the next era of the internet. Like the Marvel villain Thanos, Web3 is inevitable.
Welcome to Web3:
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Or is it? While it’s undeniable that energy, money, and talent are surging into Web3 projects, remaking the web is a major undertaking. For all its promise, blockchain faces significant technical, environmental, ethical, and regulatory hurdles between here and hegemony. A growing chorus of skeptics warns that Web3 is rotten with speculation, theft, and privacy problems, and that the pull of centralization and the proliferation of new intermediaries is already undermining the utopian pitch for a decentralized web.
Meanwhile, businesses and leaders are trying to make sense of the potential — and pitfalls — of a rapidly changing landscape that could pay serious dividends to organizations that get it right. Many companies are testing the Web3 waters, and while some have enjoyed major successes, several high-profile firms are finding that they (or their customers) don’t like the temperature. Most people, of course, don’t even really know what Web3 is: In a casual poll of HBR readers on LinkedIn in March 2022, almost 70% said they didn’t know what the term meant.
Welcome to the confusing, contested, exciting, utopian, scam-ridden, disastrous, democratizing, (maybe) decentralized world of Web3. Here’s what you need to know.
Install Update: From Web1 to Web3
To put Web3 into context, let me offer a quick refresher.
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Watch “The Explainer: What Is Web3?”
In the beginning, there was the internet: the physical infrastructure of wires and servers that lets computers, and the people in front of them, talk to each other. The U.S. government’s ARPANET sent its first message in 1969, but the web as we know it today didn’t emerge until 1991, when HTML and URLs made it possible for users to navigate between static pages. Consider this the read-only web, or Web1.
In the early 2000s, things started to change. For one, the internet was becoming more interactive; it was an era of user-generated content, or the read/write web. Social media was a key feature of Web2 (or Web 2.0, as you may know it), and Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr came to define the experience of being online. YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google, along with the ability to comment on content, expanded our ability to watch, learn, s
earch, and communicate.
