More than ever we are at the mercy of giants based on platforms such as Google and Amazon, who act as digital owners. We have become cloud -serfs, giving our data and producing billions of value for the algorithms that we never have.
More than 80% of Netflix’s visualization is issued by its recommendation algorithm, and Amazon is far from being a neutral market: its corresponding engine offers a preferential treatment to Amazon products themselves, and third -party sellers pay up to 50% of their income at rates for the privilege of competing for Amazon customers.
Web3’s promise was a world beyond these digital owners.
Claiming the web3 thesis
Web3, as defined by the co-founder of Ethereum, Gavin Wood, in 2014, was a “post-sownden network”, an antidote against centralized control based on peer confidence.
Gavin’s architectural vision has been crooked.
Ethereum created “more individual millionaires than any other project” and together with the rest of the ICOS wave, the approach of technological principles to financial gains changed.
Millions of dollars were channeled to speculative ICOs, up to 90% of which suffered important losses or were missing within a year. This culminated in the 2021 bullish market, where Crypto market capitalization briefly touched $ 3 billion, and “web3” was diluted in a marketing term to attract investors.
The mission of building an internet without trust, equally, for a while would be buried under the layers of exaggeration.
Intermediaries no more
The power of centralized platforms comes from their role as a trust intermediary.
Trust Amazon to handle arbitrary payments and disputes with vendors; Trust Google to veterinar, range and present information. This confidence model as a service creates a golden cage: the intermediary has the rules, data and a significant cut of the exchanged value.
Early web3 tried to solve this problem with transactions in the chain, where each interaction is a public and permanent registry. But this is like asking a global trade system to run a unique congested road. Real world trade requires an infrastructure that can match its speed and complexity, not everything should be a transaction in the chain.
State channels have a higher infrastructure
Think of a state channel as a private high speed lane between two parts that avoids the congested block chain. Thousands of interactions (value transfers, data permits and contract updates) can occur instantly and for free, with each step signed cryptographically.
The main barrier to digital trade between peers has been the risk that a party does not comply with its side of an agreement. The design of the state channel (ERC-7824) eliminates this risk without sacrificing efficiency. Before carrying out transactions, the parties commit funds to an intelligent contract in the chain. This acts as a security deposit. If one of the parties moves away, its funds committed to the chain ensure that the other party is made complete. When solving profits and losses in real time, the system eliminates the need for a central confidence intermediary.
- For commerce: instead of renting space on the Amazon platform and paying up to 50% in rates, a buyer and a seller opens a direct channel governed by an impartial intelligent contract.
- For data: instead of delivering your life story to Google, it opens a channel with an application, gives temporary access and paid to your data and revoking it at will.
This combination of chain safety and efficiency out of the chain allows a new creation: the autonomous company. This is a system where commercial logic is coded in intelligent contracts, it is executed transparently and operating worldwide without the need for a traditional corporate structure.
Bitcoin eliminated the need to trust government money. Ethereum eliminated the need to trust people to enforce contracts. Now is the time to eliminate the need for people to blindly trust platforms.
