Mar 19, 2019

9 min read

The future of Web 3.0?

How The Waves blockchain will reshape the Web

the (r)evolution

Blockchain has been reshaping various aspects of our society.
Having started with finance and pay systems, it now tackles the WEB itself.
Bitcoin has been misunderstood by many who were merely seeking financial gains, it is in its essence a political statement.
Satoshi Nakamoto made this clear in the genesis block: “The Times 03/Jan/2009, Chancellor on brink of the second bailout for banks.”
The people have been trying to fight back the one-sided and corrupt financial system but, in the end, it always came down to the question, “what’s the alternative?”
This type of debate is over. The bitcoin network has succeeded in toppling it.

progress doesn’t stop, sleep, or halt

Yet, let us not make the mistake the financial elites made and keep in mind that progress is never-ending. While bitcoin maximalists are busy defending themselves and ignoring technological progress, many projects are working on reshaping the web itself.
Compare technological progress to a force of nature. Imagine the gravity effect of jumping out of a window, you will touch the ground, no matter your opinion on gravity.
Cruel, it may be, but also beautiful, it is a force reshaping every aspect of society, our lives.

let us be captains of our ships

Thus, let’s not waste time with fighting technological progress or debate about it. But let’s explore it and use it for our purpose and our convictions. Think of the clichéd captain of his ship trying to navigate, he cannot change the winds and waves to his liking, but he can react to them and position himself to go on a safe journey.
Because I’m the captain of my own ship I choose to look to the future towards Web 3.0 !

centralized/decentralized

While the web3.0 is rarely discussed, the most argued topics circle around identifying centralization and achieving decentralization.
Decentralization is difficult to achieve, I believe, but we can work towards it.
Similar to freedom. One cannot be truly free. There will always be impediments, like our body’s limitations, our need to breathe or eat.
But that doesn’t mean we should give up on them, we should seek freedom and we should seek decentralization.

own your keys and pay your fees

You cannot change the web without changing the way we approach it. Many habits and acquired usages will change in the future.

At the moment, we are guests on super servers hosted by google, amazon or Facebook.
We benefit from a free ride without investing any hard work, and, if something goes wrong, a password is lost or an account hacked, the support teams helps us.

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?
Well, this fairy tale has a dark side.
We don’t pay directly, and we receive excellent support, but we are also enslaved.
We don’t own our data, which means that our data can be sold or used against us. We don’t own our accounts, someone can simply close them for whatever reason.
We build digital castles we don’t own.

Ever seen the Oliver Stone movie Wallstreet?
Gordon Gekko sets the ambitious and talented Bud Fox up by providing a comfortable life, nice car apartment and even a girlfriend for him.
But, as soon as Bud Fox stops following Gekko’s rules, he simply loses it all. He never owned any of it.
The same illusion has been sold to us by the web2.0.

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.
For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.”
- Biblical verse: Luke 12:48.

or a little more recent:
“With great power comes great responsibility”
-Uncle Ben (Spider-Man)

Web3

Web3.0 will give us more power but it will also mean we will need to have more responsibility, we will pay for our transactions, and we will learn to keep our private keys safe.

There will be no more centralized server that can reset our accounts or send us new passwords.

Important: We will own our data. We have a free permission to use our data, send it and pay for assets. This is a step towards personal freedom.

So how does Sasha ivanov imagine Web3.0?

Web3:

Will let you control your data.
Will be essentially decentralized.
Will still be monetizable; but the monetization will be more transparent.
Should (and hopefully will) be essentially unbreakable.
Will be a consortium of different technologies merged through blockchain (or other decentralized tech, should it emerge)

Web3 goes beyond Internet. This is a new paradigm of connected technologies (IoT, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence) which run on a decentralized layer, which brings them together and give them new synergistic meaning. It goes from technology to the structure of society, shaping and improving it.” — sasha ivanov

How do we get there?

Sasha Ivanov founder of Waves has been talking about web3.0 nonstop, and while many still don’t grasp what it is all about, we will soon hear much more about it. I see WAVES far above other projects in terms of scalability and user-friendly handling.

Waves started as a blockchain company and recently reinvented itself as a fully web3.0 project.

A huge part of the journey and somehow the gateway to Web3 is the Waves Keeper.

The Waves browser extension allows users to manage their private keys and interact securely and seamlessly with Waves-enabled web services and dApps.

A small and subtle extension that holds your keys and connects you to dApps, this tool basically allows you to surf web3.

There’s no need of a centralized user authentication system since WAVES Keeper will sign all the transactions on the user side, your keys will never leave your computer.

Think of it as a digital safe with the ability to connect with everything in no time.

Some aspects (private key, seeds, or addresses) will need time to be intelligible to all.
I find that, after a successful set up of the keeper, however, it is quite straight forward in usage.

Use cases

onemillionpixelwaves.com

One of the interesting aspects of blockchain is its growing “visibility”.
While lines of codes or simple wallets seem abstract to people new to the blockchain. Projects like One Million Pixel Waves are simple to grasp, while powered by the same technology.

Inspired by the famous “Million Dollar Homepage” and enriched with the power of the WAVES Blockchain, Smart Contracts and WAVES Keeper, reaching a strong integration between the WEB and the blockchain in an easy and elegant way.

For as low as 0.01 WAVES per pixel you can get your own piece of the WAVES Blockchain, forever, immortalizing a picture of your choice with a link.

One Million Pixel Waves uses no database, in fact the images and the links will be stored on directly in the blockchain.

Games

According to data from late 2018, the gaming industry numbers 2.2 billion active gamers worldwide and generates more than $134 billion annually! It’s also one of the areas that blockchain is most rapidly transforming and creating new opportunities.

The gaming industry is one of the most successful and technological evolving industries, it’s a smart plan to tackle the gaming area.

Waves is offering a massive incentive of 1 million WAVES to support the gaming industry targeting blockchain.

The company Tradisys has been working hard and delivering some epic games already. All of them are connected through the waves blockchain and compatible with waves keeper.

Fhloston Paradise had an absurdly high payout of 4700 Waves

Ligatokens is the project of Waves Community. This is the spin-off of Worldcuptokens with the same rules. 32 tokens represent 32 Champions League teams.
Your goal is to choose the Champions League champion and to hodl till the end.
You can buy this tokens on the Waves DEX and trade them whenever you want.

What’s to come

Waves will reshape many aspects of the Web3.0. It is too early, and they are too various to cover in detail. So, it’s best to just quote their plan:

”Based on this architecture we’re building several applications now, with mass adoption in mind.

They tap into diverse markets but are unified by the ideas of tokenization, being accessible to a mass audience, and providing an unparalleled level of transparency.

We are building a decentralized voting platform. This is one of the most promising directions for distributed tech. Its usage on the municipal level is starting to happen- and its widespread application is inevitable. Transparent, anonymous and verifiable voting can change the game completely.

We build a social network. It might seem too ambitious but this is just the right moment to do it. Privacy preserving, tokenized social network can be a huge leap forward for social interaction. We know how to do it, and you’ll see a prototype this summer.

We’re launching Vostok network, our WEB3.0 solution for enterprise. Any implementation of blockchain tech in enterprise is WEB3.0 by default, since only a combination of different technologies, on a decentralized footing, can make sense in a corporate environment. Without it blockchain is just a weird database.

We don’t solely do blockchain tech any longer; it is just a part of a bigger picture. We’re becoming the first company that focuses exclusively on monetizable WEB3.0 applications. We want to become one of the first Googles or Facebooks of the future Internet. Godspeed to us, decentralize or die!”

No hype but Fundamental progress

While talking about freedom, interesting use cases and decentralization is fun.

It is practically worthless without a solid scalable technology behind it.
We had plenty of unique ideas in 2017, each one promising to change the world. Oddly, the devs didn’t seem to understand the weak, overcomplicated and unscalable platform-solution they where building on (ethereum).
What we were left with, were slow and expensive dapps. Reminds me of netsurfing in the 90ies.

Waves don’t make this mistake, they are working and improving constantly on their own chain and their native smart contract language named “RIDE”

The upgrade to Waves’ native blockchain language is a key step along the way to full dApp implementation and Web 3.0 development.

“ Blockchain really isn’t designed for carrying out complicated computations.
Blockchain architecture simply isn’t suited to this.

After seeing the vulnerabilities and edge cases that have arisen on Ethereum, Waves has always maintained that Turing-completeness should not be essential for on-chain blockchain computations. The RIDE language itself is deliberately non-Turing complete for this reason. However, Turing complete computations can still be achieved by spreading operations over consecutive blocks, if such functionality is required. RIDE therefore offers a flexible but safe solution for on-blockchain computation.”

RIDE for dApps is being introduced to grant an account a way of assigning a programmable function to itself, with callable functions that are able to: