3 steps to Web3 adoption

Hubert Kratiroff delivers his three top tips for Web3 adoption by businesses. For some years now, people have been calling for a reinvention of the good old Web. That was the ambition of Web 2.0. But in reality, the fairy tale has turned into a nightmare. The social Web has been hijacked, scandal after scandal, and data battles too. Social platforms themselves are trying to reinvent themselves, like Meta. Hubert Kratiroff, a seasoned professional in Web3 and digital strategy, gives you his keys to diving into Web3 and taking your first steps. An optimistic and logical presentation, that avoids glossing over the risks that this new Web will have to face.

3 steps to Web3 adoption by businesses

Tim Berners-Lee launched Solid and Contract for the Web. Then came Web3, a concept that is not always easy to understand. Here’s the interview we did with Hubert a few weeks ago. It’ll give you an idea of a concept that’s still a little vague, and help you come to grips with it in a concrete way. As a result of Web3, we may well be witnessing a certain revival of the Web, called for by many Web players and users.

“Web3 is the true expression of the Web”

The Web3 of 2023 is a return to the Web’s roots, as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee, its inventor in ’89. Tim Berners-Lee’s Web in ’89 was a Web for users

But Web 2.0 came to hijack the Web, with platforms like Twitter or Meta and even more recently TikTok. Tech giants with huge budgets have been able to bring great technologies to market, then hijack them for their own benefit.

Today, “Web3 reflects Tim Berners-Lee’s initial vision of a semantic Web”, Hubert tells us.

And yet, at the Web Summit, that was held in Lisbon, from the 1st to the 4th of November in 2022, Tim Berners-Lee reportedly asked that this new version of the Web be “ignored”.

“I think he’s mainly driven by the desire to develop his startup Inrupt, which advocates a technology that’s not far from Solid, the Smart Contracts language of blockchain. I think he’s more upset that he didn’t declare this Web3 development himself,” Hubert points out.

He wanted to call it the Semantic Web. It was a Web where all data was structured in a certain way across all sites.

With this concept, anyone could recover all their data. Users could reappropriate it. This was Berners-Lee’s idea of the Semantic Web, the idea of disassociating data from platforms. As a result, giving users ownership over their own data.

This semantic Web unfortunately didn’t catch on because it was caught up by the big platforms

The term Web3, meanwhile, was coined by Gavin Hood, who along with Vitalik Buterin, is the co-inventor of Ethereum.

Ethereum is a blockchain

“A blockchain is a database, like hundreds of thousands of others, with the distinctive feature that it’s impossible to modify or delete any information. Everything that is recorded is recorded for life, and you can’t go back on it,” Hubert explains.

Gavin Hood and Vitalik Buterin invented the Ethereum blockchain, which is a shared database on which they nestled 3 things:

1. 1. From Smart Contracts
   2. One currency, the ETH, today is worth around €1,700 or $1,800. With an all-time cap of €4,500 or $4,900
   3. And the NFT

We can do Web3 without relying on today’s complex technologies

Wikipedia and Twitter are going to become hybrid Web2/Web3 companies,” Hubert continues. They may have been founded on the basis of Web 2.0, with good intentions, but they’re going to have to reinvent themselves.

Web3 is more complex than Web 2.0, that’s the price of our freedom

We, the users, have been responsible for the hegemony of the big platforms

These major platforms have played the user interface (UI) card to the hilt, allowing us to publish photos with a single click. Likewise, you setting up your mailbox with SMTP, IMAP, POP, etc, is rather quite complex. On the other hand, with Gmail or Yahoo, everything is encapsulated, easy, and fluid.

For ease, we used Gmail and Instagram because we didn’t want to get our hands into the code

“Web3 is going to make us actors again, with the need for a little technical expertise and tools to manipulate,” adds Hubert.

Web3 adoption in 3 steps

The first step in getting a foothold in Web3 is to use the open-source browser Brave. Surfing in Brave lets you earn BAT (Basic Attention Token), a kind of cryptocurrency that pays a creator.

A second step into Web3 is as simple as looking at the videos in Odysee, rather than YouTube. It’s essentially the same thing, except that viewing a video pays 1/10th of a cent or 1/1000th of a cent to the creator.

For music, rather than paying €15 a month to a streaming platform, using Pianity allows authors to be paid directly.

Web3 adoption obstacles: the threat of venture capitalists

Web3 does, however, have a few obstacles in its path.

“Web 2.0 was owned by large platforms. We mustn’t let Web3 become the domain of investors,” Hubert warns us. Starting with AECI, which is investing heavily in Web3.

There’s always the old opposition between the Web, heir to the American hippies of the ’60s and ’70s, and today’s capitalist Web. The more things change…

We don’t want to go from Web 2.0 functional ownership to Web 3 capital ownership

No right to be forgotten in Web3

“Everything said in Web3 is traceable. It will be possible to go back decades. A bit like what http://archive.org does today, which has recorded sites since 1993.” Everything is registered there, Hubert points out.

We’ll have to be careful with this right to forget and make users more responsible

There’s a lot of learning to be done on Web3 to guide users. They won’t be able to say just anything. After all, in 5, 10, or 15 years” time, anything that’s said on the site could be taken up again and would be absolutely unenforceable.

A final prediction

Ledger: future Web3 “decacorn” according to Hubert.

I predict that Ledger by the first quarter of 2023 will be the first French decacorn

So let’s keep an open mind and keep an eye on innovations, as we’re still discovering new things.