Companies without a CEO, control of your data and a "hyper financial" Internet: this is the new Web that will change everything

30 years ago, a group of scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), led by Tim Berners-Lee, published the formal proposal for the World Wide Web, a system for using the Internet by – among other things – type addresses that start with your acronym: www.

The proposal was a success and opened the technology – which was used mainly for scientific, academic and governmental purposes – to the whole world, igniting the fuse of the digital revolution.

In a first stage, called Web1, it offered static content and the user could only visit pages, without much other interaction. Towards the middle of the first decade of this millennium, Web2 or "social" arrived. Indeed, blogs and platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter created the figure of the prosumer: Internet users not only consume content, they also generate it.

Thus, a network that had been thought to be "decentralized" (if one of the nodes fell, the infrastructure would not be affected in its entirety), ended up being centralized: large Internet companies or "bigtech" are the ones that offer the platforms and they control much of the online business. In fact, Google and Facebook account for 90% of global digital advertising based on user data control.

At the same time, in 2009 a new trend started that boosted Bitcoin and, in turn, was continued by several experts, such as Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood, who co-founded Ethereum in 2015.

In this way, they managed to make it possible to program applications on the blockchain respecting the principles of the first cryptocurrency: without authorities or intermediaries (exchanges take place directly between users), protecting anonymity and 100% open. Thus, they took up the old promise of the Internet and kicked off the creation of a new one: Web3.

The new internet

Ethereum kickstarted decentralized finance (DeFi) based on smart contracts. In other words, software with preset rules that allows you to automate functions, such as receiving deposits, investing them, and distributing income proportionally among users.

But DeFi is part of a broader universe of decentralized applications (Dapps) where everything is done person to person (P2P), without companies involved: social networks, communication, ecommerce, games and much more. It is about a strong paradigm shift that collides head-on with the business model of bigtech companies, such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, among others.

"Since there is no single figure that controls user data in ways that only it knows about, we obviously achieved a system with greater privacy for users. That figure that exploits data that we have seen in the emergence of the bigtech", remarks to iProUP Ezio Rojas, Social Media Manager of Parity Technologies.

This company is the technical arm behind Polkadot, a network that allows for the interoperability of blockchains and designed by Wood, the engineer who programmed Ethereum and also created the Web3 foundation.

In the same sense, Maximiliano Hinz, director of Binance, adds to iProUP :"Until now there was no possibility of participating in the management of our data, we had to transfer it to a third party".

"With decentralized services, we not only distribute that information in smaller pieces to many people, but we can take part and verify that it is kept private," he remarks. But, in addition to data privacy, it also promotes security, which "depended on a single company when you gave up your information or money," says Rojas.

"In contrast, in a decentralized protocol, the only way there is an attack is for more than half of the nodes to be attacked simultaneously, which complicates the logistics and makes it more difficult to do this type of attack." interventions", complete.

Nahuel Burbach, Argentine representative of the Zerion platform, assures iProUP that "there is a spectrum of decentralization: the more decentralized a network is, without losing too much efficiency, it can provide higher levels of privacy and security to users through the different protocols and applications.

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Likewise, Rojas points out that "Web3 seeks to eliminate the Single Point of Failure from the equation, thus seeking to prevent the crash of a Facebook server from causing WhatsApp to stop working for 1,500 million people."

In effect, Hinz has no doubt that "the growth of decentralized applications is going to be a challenge for bigtech companies and it will depend on them to leverage this technology. Today, we have protocols like IPFS to have a decentralized storage system." In this way, there are already Web3 options that provide solutions similar to those of bigtech, namely:

But they are not the only ones: the dapp map changes all the time and some even allow you to earn rewards for certain actions within the platform. To use these apps you need to have a non-custodial wallet (such as Trust, Math, Metamask, etc.) that works with Ethereum.

According to Hinz, we are up to a pivotal moment, in which "it was shown that the classic paradigm of concentrating power does not work. Today, the crypto industry (not only cryptocurrencies) is one of the fastest growing and It is based on the decentralization and democratization of power".

In fact, initiatives such as Argentina's Decentraland and CriptoCountry also came out before bigtech in the metaverse, the next big Internet trend with the promise of an $800 billion market. For that, they use another tool from the crypto world: non-fungible tokens or NFTs.

"The metaverse is a way to close an idea that has been brewing and allows people to interact in a world that mixes the real and the virtual at unimagined levels. NFTs have a lot of potential not only in terms of art, but also that will enable a form of authentication never seen before," says Burbach.

Hyperfinancialization and companies without CEO

Mariano Di Pietrantonio, Argentine representative of MakerDAO, tells iProUP that the new concept of "Web3 is purely financial, not only from the point of view of markets, but also from the that everything can be tradable".

"You can do things that you couldn't do before because you depended on an entity. Like what happened on Web2 with PayPal in Argentina: we were far outside. But Web3 allows the hyper-financialization of all internet activities", he completes .

The expert points out that in the new Internet there will also be a "financialization of the tribes", that is, virtual communities, through the Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO), equivalent to "companies" without a CEO or parent company, in which all users who buy a token will participate in its governance, in the style of a voting shareholder.

"A DAO is a bunch of people who come together to develop a common goal. For example, otakus who like anime can form one to buy NFTs or relics related to a Japanese cartoon. You can take that to any niche, worldwide and with financial products", completes Di Pietrantonio.

According to Hinz, moreover, "the DAOs will be the ones that can compete with the bigtechs if they set their minds to it. The great benefit is that the users will be the ones who decide on the product and not the other way around."

Rojas agrees and adds that "DAOs will play a 'democratizing' or even 'inclusive' role within corporate sectors. With this governance system we open the possibility for users themselves to make decisions and be part of global projects, without any limitation imposed by their gender, nationality or profession".

As an additional advantage, Di Pietrantonio remarks that "the financing of these organizations will be easier than on Web2, since it can come from the people themselves, as we saw in the ICO era", referring to the Public Offering de Monedas that several projects launched to raise funds, in the style of an IPO.

"It is another paradigm shift: before, access to investment possibilities was very limited, but today it is in the hands of any user. It is very interesting: if we combine it with niches, what better than a fan of something to evaluate a project on that topic", he completes.

Burbach assures that "startups are already accessing financing faster than in the traditional way due to the agility of technology. In addition, the field is being opened to smaller investors who previously could not do so due to geographical limitations, regulations, etc. The Argentine ecosystem is no exception: there are very good projects that were born from scratch taking advantage of this opportunity".

For his part, Hinz remarks that "today many companies avoid carrying out an IPO because of the cost and even launching a share in a small market like Argentina does not make sense, since the chances of a positive round are low. But by moving to an ICO model, the chances of success are much higher, because the potential market is 200 times bigger."

"This translates into more chances of an effective launch and leads to the growth of companies with the creation of jobs and a positive effect on the local economy. Without a doubt, it is something very interesting and that local entrepreneurs should see up close," he adds.

Web3 opens up another great opportunity for the country, according to Rojas, because it has "people with a lot of talent, but unfortunately it has come up against many bureaucratic limitations that have put an unfair ceiling.""Internet and the advantages without borders that it offers from the beginning have served for the great emergence of projects, such as Mercado Libre", he exemplifies.

Thus, Web3 promises to change everything. A new scheme in which the big ones will be less big. But the best thing is that the users will be less users and more "managers" of their online services.