Exploring Web3 From the View of Blockchain

Abstract

Web3 is the most hyped concept from 2020 to date, greatly motivating the prosperity of the Internet of Value and Metaverse. However, no solid evidence stipulates the exact definition, criterion, or standard in the sense of such a buzzword. To fill the gap, we aim to clarify the term in this work. We narrow down the connotation of Web3 by separating it from high-level controversy argues and, instead, focusing on its protocol, architecture, and evaluation from the perspective of blockchain fields. Specifically, we have identified all potential architectural design types and evaluated each of them by employing the scenario-based architecture evaluation method. The evaluation shows that existing applications are neither secure nor adoptable as claimed. Meanwhile, we also discuss opportunities and challenges surrounding the Web3 space and answer several prevailing questions from communities. A primary result is that Web3 still relies on traditional internet infrastructure, not as independent as advocated. This report, as of June 2022, provides the first strict research on Web3 in the view of blockchain. We hope that this work would provide a guide for the development of future Web3 services.

Towards Web3 Applications: Easing the Access and Transition

“…Following its narrative connotation, we observe that Web3 users still occupy a pretty small percentage (around 0.03% of 4.95B 3 Internet users) over the Internet. The constraints majorly come from its incompatibility: (i) a typical Web3 application cannot be smoothly applied in a traditional web context due to the absence of a blockchain engine; conversely, (ii) a traditional Web2 application can hardly be integrated with blockchain due to the lack of proper Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).…”

“…Later, Weyl et al [1] illustrate the ways of building a decentralized society by exploring Web3-related applications, requirements, opportunities, and challenges. Wang et al [3] provide the discussion between Web3 and blockchain from the perspective of architecture design. The work has identified a total of 12 types of designs according to the data workflow of access, computation and storage.…”

“…Web3 has drawn intensive attention from communities and investors. As an umbrella term, Web3 covers a series of blockchainbased decentralized applications (Dapps), services and economics [1][2][3][4][5] that bring significant impacts on both traditional finance and cryptocurrency markets. To date (as of Sep, 2022), over 12, 143 Dapps 2 have been developed on-chain and 285, 152 smart contracts are deployed across 48 protocols.…”

ComputerBank: A Community-based Computer Donation Platform using Machine Learning and NFT

“…The development of a web3-based portal [9]. As the idea of Web3, a decentralized version of the world wide web, is still extremely new, there is little to no help regarding the development of a platform based on it.…”

Generic-NFT: A Generic Non-Fungible Token Architecture for Flexible Value Transfer in Web3

“…The development of user-centric Web3 is still in its infancy. To solve the current situation where Internet giants monopolize the power to use user data, Web3 needs to establish a decentralized identifier (DID) to link user data with it in the form of DID documents [1]. Do user assets need to be similarly decentralized representation in Web3?…”