Category: Web 3.0

From Dot-Com to Decentralized: The Untold History of Web

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Blockchain, internet, Web 3.0Leave a comment

The internet, since its inception, has evolved in stages — from a static collection of documents to an interactive web of platforms and, now, to a decentralized, user-owned ecosystem. The latest phase, known as Web3, is not just a technological leap, but a philosophical shift in how we perceive ownership, identity, and value on the internet. To understand the future Web3 aims to shape, it is essential to understand where it came from — and why.

Web3 is often positioned as the successor to Web1 and Web2, but it is far more than a linear upgrade. Web1, the original internet of the 1990s and early 2000s, was a read-only experience. Users could browse static web pages, read information, and perhaps send an email, but the infrastructure was decentralized and open. Anyone with a basic understanding of HTML could build and publish. It was the age of personal websites, forums, and informational repositories like early Wikipedia. Users owned their content because they hosted it.

By the mid-2000s, Web2 emerged — bringing with it interactivity, social media, and the era of centralized platforms. It transformed users from passive consumers to active participants. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter empowered users to create and share content easily. However, these innovations came with a tradeoff: centralized control. Users provided content, but corporations harvested and monetized the data. Power, both technical and economic, became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few tech giants.

The seeds of Web3 were planted as a reaction to this centralization. The 2008 financial crisis played a pivotal role in this shift. Trust in traditional institutions had eroded, and the release of the Bitcoin white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto offered a radical alternative — a peer-to-peer financial system that required no intermediaries. Bitcoin was more than a digital currency; it was a movement. It demonstrated that decentralized systems could function without centralized control or trust, secured instead by cryptography and consensus mechanisms.

The principles behind Bitcoin — decentralization, transparency, trustlessness — became the philosophical foundation of Web3. The subsequent development of Ethereum in 2015, spearheaded by Vitalik Buterin and others, took the concept further. Ethereum introduced smart contracts — self-executing code deployed on the blockchain — enabling developers to build decentralized applications (dApps). This was the beginning of Web3 as we know it today: an internet where users could not only read and write but also own.

Ownership in Web3 is both literal and symbolic. On-chain assets like cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and tokenized governance rights allow users to have a stake in the platforms they use. Unlike Web2, where user content is monetized by platforms, Web3 enables a model where users are stakeholders — participating in value creation and governance. For example, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) emerged as a novel structure for collective ownership, decision-making, and funding, all encoded transparently on the blockchain.

The Web3 movement also brought forward innovations in identity. Instead of using centralized login systems owned by Google or Facebook, users in Web3 authenticate via wallets like MetaMask, using public-private key cryptography. This wallet becomes their identity across decentralized apps, preserving anonymity while enabling provable ownership and reputation. Furthermore, projects like ENS (Ethereum Name Service) and decentralized identity protocols aim to give users portable digital identities that they control.

Despite its promise, Web3 has faced significant challenges. Scalability, user experience, regulatory uncertainty, and environmental concerns (particularly with proof-of-work systems) have all slowed mainstream adoption. Ethereum’s early years were plagued by congestion and high gas fees, which led to the rise of competing blockchains like Solana, Avalanche, and Polkadot — all of which aim to provide more scalable and efficient infrastructures.

The NFT boom of 2021 marked Web3’s first major pop culture moment. Suddenly, blockchain was no longer just about finance — it was about art, music, gaming, and digital expression. However, the ensuing bubble also revealed the speculative excesses in the space, as well as the need for better user education, legal frameworks, and long-term value creation.

Web3 also intersects with broader technological and societal shifts. It complements the rise of edge computing, AI, and the metaverse. In fact, some envision the metaverse — an immersive, persistent digital universe — as being natively Web3, where assets are interoperable and economies are owned by the participants, not platforms. Companies like Yuga Labs (behind Bored Ape Yacht Club), Decentraland, and The Sandbox are early experiments in that direction.

As of 2025, Web3 remains both a buzzword and a battleground. Traditional tech companies are integrating blockchain technology, often in ways that dilute its decentralized ethos. Meanwhile, governments are introducing legislation to tame the anarchic nature of Web3, from crypto taxation laws to outright bans or heavy licensing. The tension between decentralization and compliance is one of the defining issues of Web3’s evolution.

At its core, Web3 is not just about blockchains or tokens — it’s a vision of a more equitable internet. It represents an ideological realignment with the original spirit of the web: open, permissionless, and user-first. But realizing that vision at scale is a monumental challenge, requiring breakthroughs in scalability, UX design, privacy-preserving technologies, and above all, governance.

Web3’s history is still being written. Like any paradigm shift, it is met with skepticism, resistance, and growing pains. But just as Web1 gave birth to Google and Web2 gave birth to Facebook, Web3 will produce its own transformative giants — not necessarily companies, but perhaps protocols, collectives, and communities that reshape how we interact, transact, and belong online.

Is Aave making the case for decentralized social media?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Blockchain, DeFi, Innovation, Web 3.0Leave a comment

What shall we call ‘decentralized social media’? Decentralized finance was easily turned into DeFi, but DeSM or DeSocMed doesn’t have quite the same ring. Still, somebody will come up with a shortened version in time.

One of the proponents of decentralized social media is Stani Kulechov, the founder of the Aave DeFi protocol. He has been tweeting teasers about his support for decentralized SM platforms, pointing out that there is a widespread belief that the current SM platforms generally ‘suck’. Twitter has also been talking about it, which surely points to that’s the way it is considering going.

According to The Defiant, five persons in crypto told the website that Kulechov has sent them a cryptic text asking them to sign up to ‘lens.dev. However, The Defiant was unable to find out from Aave or Kulechov any more information about this site.

The Lens Protocol

Follow the lens.dev link yourself and you’ll find yourself at a simple site that contains a  short letter expressing dissatisfaction with Web2.0 social media companies, such as Facebook and Twitter. The letter says, “Web3 brings forth a renewed hope for what social media can be. It offers the ability for us to control how our content is used. We can have the power to own and monetize our content and community with no middlemen or centralized data harvesting.”

Should you wish to sign the letter, you do so with a tweet. The tweet includes a cryptographic signature that uses their Ethereum wallet and text that usually reads “I should own this tweet @lensprotocol #digitalroots.”

This is not the first attempt to decentralize social media. Other efforts include STEEM, which emphasized blogging; FEEDWEAVE, which was built on Arweave and Cent is an experiment in selling content. None of them have made much impact on the SM world, but as The Defiant says, “the top minds in the space seem to believe that this is still a crackable use case for one blockchain or another.” Indeed, Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX said, “I think social media on the blockchain — I continue to think this could be absolutely huge. I think it solves a lot of existing pain points, which are really coming to the forefront of society right now.” Of the others who have been talking up the idea, one supporter is Vitalik Buterin, who has proposed an SM platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. However, perhaps Aave will beat him to it, and these cryptic tweets are just the beginning of the platform’s attempt to finally deliver a blockchain-based, decentralized social media platform. Then perhaps we’ll know what to call it!

Web 3 is nothing new

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Blockchain, Metaverse, NFTs, Web 3.0Leave a comment

The idea of a decentralized web has been in the minds of many for around 20 years, but when you read much of the press about it today, you’d be forgiven for believing it was a brand new concept.

The concept is a response to the domination of Web 2.0 by the Big Tech companies, Facebook and Google in particular, explains Michael J. Casey, and their “data-driven economics.” Most of us understand by now exactly how those two companies in particular exploited the web and us, even as at the same time they reunited us with old friends, helped us grow businesses and made searching so more intuitive. After all, who remembers using search engines in the era Before Google? It was much slower and you really needed to know how to search.

However there is quite some debate raging around the concept of Web 3. On the one hand, as Casey reports, there is Chris Dixon who is a fervent Web 3 supporter and a believer that Web 3 projects are creating real value, and on the other, Jack Dorsey, who claims the “term is just a buzzword exploited by venture capitalists to boost their equity and token investment.” Casey says in response to this, “That smart people – including two famous “Tims” – have been exploring an exit from Web 2.0 for so long suggests Web 3 projects have worthy ambitions and that there will be public benefits and business payoffs if they succeed.” But he concedes, “this long history reminds us that solving a very big problem is hard and that investors would be wise to take grandiose promises with a grain of salt.”

It is possible not to side with either Chris or Jack, and instead focus on the core structural issues with Web 2.0 and why there’s a need to change them. The fundamental problem with Web 2.0 is the misalignment between the interests of the giant companies that dominate the Internet and those of the general public. Casey says that whilst blockchain is a solution, it is not the only one. As Casey says, “We need a mix of technologies (both decentralized and centralized), regulation and economic rationale to enable business models that bring those competing private and public interests together.”

Let’s not forget that Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Internet, said in 2006 that the web needed an overhaul. He allegedly coined the term Web 3.0, in reference to the evolution of universal data formats and artificial intelligence removing the need for intermediation by third parties to allow a true “machine-to-machine” communication network.

Currently, Web 3.0 is primarily associated with blockchain, cryptocurrency and NFTs, and the debate is still ongoing about what Web 3.0 could potentially be in the end, but as Casey remarks, there is still a long way to go before we can escape The Matrix!