It’s too early To predict all the implications of the recent Ethereum blockchain integration, but it certainly addresses the most common (and valid) criticisms of Web 3 regarding excessive power consumption. Critics may still find a new reason to oppose ETH, but I hope this merger leads to something else: an opportunity for us to also combine the best of Web 2.0 with what’s even more exciting about web3.
There seems to be a growing rift in Silicon Valley, where the traditional Web 2.0 industry and the burgeoning Web 3 system have been portrayed as incompatible with each other. And emerging startups are stuck somewhere in the middle.
I am active in all three groups, and I believe most of this debate is based on wild statements and hype by VCs and other evangelists who are not developers. For example, constant celebrity promotions for NFT drops have contributed to the impression that web3 as a whole is a Ponzi scheme. In fact, NFTs are a small part of the web3 ecosystem and, in my opinion, are not even the most interesting or potentially transformative.
While Web 2.0 and web3 may seem incompatible, I think it’s best to see technologies like blockchain and ETH as potential back-end solutions to the scalability challenges that all businesses face. In a similar way, advocates of Web 3 must realize that the maturity of Web 2.0 makes it indispensable for many basic use cases.
Despite the great potential of web3, it is still much easier to develop a Web 2.0 application just because the ecosystem is mature and has a large and thriving developer community.
Let’s consider some examples where each side has something to contribute:
From web3: an emerging revolution in open source
To capture what’s happening in web 3 development now, we have to go back to before the web 2.0 era.
During the dotcom boom, there was a lot of buzz around open source, Linux and popular companies like Red Hat. While very few consumers will continue to install Linux as their operating system, this post helped contribute something equally important. In the background, with a few people noticing, Linux quickly became the operating system of choice for running back-end servers for 96.5% of the largest million web domains – not to mention the massive Android market.
