Web since its founding has evolved in its function. Web 1.0: Read-only web. In this initial version of the web, a user was able to only read the content. Applications included: news sites, portals, search engines, etc. Web 2.0 : Web 1.0 + interaction. This version of web applications enabled users to interact. So for example a user can comment, like a post, etc. Applications include social networks, chatting apps, etc. Web 3.0 : Web 2.0 + Trust & verifiability. Web 2.0 applications harvested users’ content and data to make money, taking away the privacy and control from the users. Web 3 is a movement to shift the power back to the users – making the web open, secure, resilient, and private.

The first element of the Web 3 is the decentralized web. It means internet applications on Web 3 do not rely on centralized servers. Web 2 services go down when a server goes down whereas Web 3 services cannot go down as the data is stored in multiple copies on a P2P ( peer-to-peer ) network. The data is then managed via data distribution protocols such as IPFS. IPFS ( InterPlanetary File System ) powers the creation of diversely resilient networks that enable persistent availability — with or without Internet backbone connectivity.

The second element of the Web 3 is blockchain. It helps provide verifiability, ownership, and economic incentive to the rightful owner of the content. The smart contracts store the ownership and transactions data on the blockchain, making the ownership verifiable and distributing the economic benefit to the content owners, not the intermediatory platforms of the Web2 world.

The World Wide Web has enabled the creation of a global information space comprising linked documents. As the Web becomes ever more enmeshed with our daily lives, there is a growing desire for direct access to raw data which is not currently available on the Web or is bound up in hypertext documents.