The evolution of blockchain towards Web3

 Restructuring the Internet to improve security, privacy and reliability

A dominant narrative surrounding today's Internet is the global proliferation of user-generated content and applications. Thanks to the rise of social media, online publishing platforms, and other tools (a trend that has been described as "Web 2.0"), individuals and organizations alike can easily share content and web experiences with a wide audience.

This democratic and approachable method does not, however, address every facet of the Internet. In many cases, the opposite is true when it comes to hosting web applications.Currently, a person or organization that wants to launch an application has few realistic options for where to store and run it.

But these limitations are changing. Thanks to technologies like blockchain, we are seeing slow but steady progress toward a more decentralized Internet. And this has interesting implications for security, privacy and reliability.

The modern Internet network is centralized in many aspects

When a person or organization wants to launch a web application, they have historically had relatively few places to host it.

If your application has few users and uses limited bandwidth, it can be located on a private, local server or data center.However, all but the largest and most resource-rich organizations find that their only affordable option is some form of cloud hosting when bandwidth needs increase or if the organization wants to deliver the fast and secure experience that many users now expect.

This solution is in no way a bad option. Cloud hosting offers many performance, security and flexibility advantages compared to local hosting. But centralizing data across a few select cloud providers also comes with challenges, including:

Service interruption: Hosting web application data on third-party servers can introduce a single point of failure unless you have implemented appropriate redundancies in your infrastructure. This can be an issue when cloud providers experience outages or have Internet connectivity issues.

Performance risks for global audiences : Cloud providers operate a relatively limited number of massive data centers, and cloud users often must choose in which geographic region their application will be hosted. If an application's users are far from its servers, they may experience latency due to long traffic paths.

Vendor lock-in: Migrating from one cloud service to another can be extremely difficult . If the cloud provider's service quality declines, or if the cloud provider establishes unfair pricing policies , organizations may struggle to find a better alternative.

Again, these challenges are not reasons to abandon the cloud. But they can explain a recent and very interesting trend: the conception, and slow emergence, of a decentralized Internet network model, based on technologies such as the blockchain. This model is often called "Web3".

Web3: What and how

Web3 is expected to be more in line with the original vision of one of the Internet's architects, Sir Tim Berners-Lee , who envisioned a distributed network without central authorities or a single point of failure. Originally called the "Semantic Web," Web3 will be an intelligent Internet network that will understand everything a user transmits, both in content and context, and process information with human-like intelligence. This will be achieved through the interconnection and decentralization of data in networks that will operate through decentralized protocols.

Berners-Lee's vision should become a reality in part thanks to new technologies such as blockchain. These technologies will decentralize Internet infrastructure and applications, and change data flows and the centralization of information.

Blockchain, in particular, is supposed to be one of the most critical technologies needed for Web3 infrastructure. The blockchain development company emerged in 2009 with the creation of bitcoin. This was created by Satoshi Nakamoto , an anonymous person or group who sought to respond to the 2008 financial crisis by decentralizing the global financial sector. As defined by Forbes , "blockchain is the innovative database technology that forms the DNA of almost all cryptocurrencies. By distributing identical copies of a database across an entire network, blockchain makes it very difficult to hack or cheat the system. Cryptocurrency is currently the most popular use of blockchains, but this technology offers the potential to serve a very wide range of applications."

Although bitcoin was the origin of blockchain technology, it is but one of many blockchains that can disrupt almost every industry and vertical, offering the range of high-impact applications described by Forbes. The most important blockchain after bitcoin, and the one most likely to drive the advancement of Web3, is Ethereum .

In 2013, Vitalik Buterin published the Ethereum white paper , and in mid-2015, its network went live.As stated by Consensys, "Ethereum is a decentralized, open source, distributed computing platform that enables the creation of smart contracts and decentralized applications." Despite sharing the same blockchain, there are a number of significant distinctions between Ethereum and Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a store of value designed exclusively for transactions. Ethereum, like bitcoin, can be used to make transactions. Most importantly, however, it allows the creation of decentralized applications, or DApps , computing applications that run on a decentralized computing system.

The Ethereum blockchain is currently considered the ideal open, trustless platform to serve as the infrastructure for a decentralized Internet network. With technologies like Ethereum driving the emergence of Web3, the world could see a new intelligent Internet built on Web 2.0 trends, but based on blockchain and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) technology. This will lead to an infinitely more powerful and user-friendly online experience and will revolutionize the interconnection of the Internet, applications and the physical world. In this way, there will be enormous improvements in terms of privacy and security thanks to the decentralization of data and cryptographic and computational techniques that preserve privacy .

Challenges for Web3

While Web3 promises to radically change the Internet and its ability to provide value to users around the world, some major hurdles still need to be overcome for mass adoption. Currently, decentralized networks have several problems that prevent the rise of Web3, including speed and scale .

Despite offering greater security, the decentralized web is currently much slower than the centralized one due to the need for authentication nodes . While a centralized application can process a huge number of requests at the same time, a decentralized application is very inferior in terms of magnitude.

Scalability is also a constant problem. Since the Ethereum network is made up of more than 8,000 nodes that contribute to its security, each transaction must be processed by all of these nodes. This can lead to network congestion and is a factor that significantly limits Ethereum's ability to handle the enterprise applications of tomorrow. Work is underway to help scale Ethereum. However, solutions for scalability, speed, and privacy would need to be developed if this blockchain—or one similar to it, like Cardano or Polkadot—were to become the core of the decentralized network.

The advantages of Web3

Once the challenges currently standing in the way of Web3 are resolved, it will provide high-impact solutions to some of the Internet's most persistent problems. For example, while today's centralized applications can suffer downtime for a variety of reasons, DApps and Web3 servers offer more resiliency with a much lower risk of downtime, as they will run on the decentralized network of tens. of thousands of Ethereum computers. With wider adoption and increasing network effects, Web3 Internet reliability will continue to improve.

Likewise, Web3 will leave behind, both in terms of volume and effectiveness, the DDoS attacks we see today, thereby further improving reliability. Since the security of the Ethereum blockchain is based on peer-to-peer networks, rather than centralized servers, cybercriminals will not be able to disrupt Internet services as easily as they can now. There will no longer be single points of failure, allowing the network to function normally even if participants are attacked or eliminated.

And now that?

While latency, scale, and reliability issues still present challenges in the transition to Web3, organizations focused on improving the Internet will help solve these issues and drive greater adoption of DApps and the decentralized network. As adoption increases, the network effect will continue to multiply the benefits of Web3, which in turn will drive greater adoption.

Currently, the Ethereum network is difficult to interact with, and requires running complex software, including downloading and cryptographically verifying massive amounts of data. This creates technical obstacles and can exclude those with low-power devices. As Web3 adoption progresses, Cloudflare will continue to help reduce barriers to accessibility for users who want to participate.

That's why Cloudflare has developed Cloudflare Ethereum Gateway , another tool in Cloudflare's distributed web gateway toolset , which users can use to interact with the Ethereum network without installing additional software. This allows anyone and any device with an Internet connection to interact with the Ethereum network securely and reliably. With the distributed web gateway, users can host content on the IPFS, interact with and develop Ethereum smart contracts, create fully decentralized websites, and much more. In line with Cloudflare's mission, these advances in Internet technology will provide greater speed, security and reliability, all based on the Cloudflare perimeter network.