By reading this, you are a participant of the web. It's amazing that we can write this blog and have it appear to you without operating a server or writing a line of code. In general, the web of today empowers us to participate more than we could at any point in the past.
Last year, we mentioned the next phase of the Internet would be always on, always secure, always private. Today, we dig into a similar trend for the web, referred to as Web3. In this blog we'll start to explain Web3 in the context of the web's evolution, and how Cloudflare might help to support it.
Going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote his seminal 1989 document “Information Management: A Proposal”, he outlined a vision of the “web” as a network of information systems interconnected via hypertext links. It is often assimilated to the Internet, which is the computer network it operates on. Key practical requirements for this web included being able to access the network in a decentralized manner through remote machines and allowing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination.
The original proposal for what we know as the web, fitting in one diagram - Source: w3
This vision materialized into an initial version of the web that was composed of interconnected static resources delivered via a distributed network of servers and accessed primarily on a read-only basis from the client side — “Web 1.0”. Usage of the web soared with the number of websites growing well over 1,000% in the ~2 years following the introduction of the Mosaic graphical browser in 1993, based on data from the World Wide Web Wanderer.
The early 2000s marked an inflection point in the growth of the web and a key period of its development, as technology companies that survived the dot-com crash evolved to deliver value to customers in new ways amidst heightened skepticism around the web:
Desktop browsers like Netscape became commoditized and paved the way for native web services for discovering content like search engines.
Network effects that were initially driven by hyperlinks in web directories like Yahoo! were hyperscaled by platforms that enabled user engagement and harnessed collective intelligence like review sites.
The massive volume of data generated by Internet activity and the growing realization of its competitive value forced companies to become experts at database management.
O’Reilly Media coined the concept of Web 2.0 in an attempt to capture such shifts in design principles, which were transformative to the usability and interactiveness of the web and continue to be core building blocks for Internet companies nearly two decades later.
However, in the midst of the web 2.0 transformation, the web fell out of touch with one of its initial core tenets — decentralization.
Decentralization: No permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on the web, there is no central controlling node, and so no single point of failure … and no “kill switch”!— History of the web by Web Foundation
A new paradigm for the Internet
This is where Web3 comes in. The last two decades have proven that building a scalable system that decentralizes content is a challenge. While the technology to build such systems exists, no content platform achieves decentralization at scale.
There is one notable exception: Bitcoin. Bitcoin was conceptualized in a 2008 whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto as a type of distributed ledger known as a blockchain designed so that a peer-to-peer (P2P) network could transact in a public, consistent, and tamper-proof manner.
That’s a lot said in one sentence. Let’s break it down by term:
A peer-to-peer network is a network architecture. It consists of a set of computers, called nodes, that store and relay information. Each node is equally privileged, preventing one node from becoming a single point of failure. In the Bitcoin case, nodes can send, receive, and process Bitcoin transactions.
A ledger is a collection of accounts in which transactions are recorded. For Bitcoin, the ledger records Bitcoin transactions.
A distributed ledger is a ledger that is shared and synchronized among multiple computers. This happens through a consensus, so each computer holds a similar replica of the ledger. With Bitcoin, the consensus process is performed over a P2P network, the Bitcoin network.
A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger that stores data in “blocks” that are cryptographically linked together into an immutable chain that preserves their chronological order. Bitcoin leverages blockchain technology to establish a shared, single source of truth of transactions and the sequence in which they occurred, thereby mitigating the double-spending problem.
Bitcoin — which currently has over 40,000 nodes in its network and processes over $30B in transactions each day — demonstrates that an application can be run in a distributed manner at scale, without compromising security. It inspired the development of other blockchain projects such as Ethereum which, in addition to transactions, allows participants to deploy code that can verifiably run on each of its nodes.
Today, these programmable blockchains are seen as ideal open and trustless platforms to serve as the infrastructure of a distributed Internet. They are home to a rich and growing ecosystem of nearly 7,000 decentralized applications (“Dapps”) that do not rely on any single entity to be available. This provides them with greater flexibility on how to best serve their users in all jurisdictions.
The web is for the end user
Distributed systems are inherently different from centralized systems. They should not be thought about in the same way. Distributed systems enable the data and its processing to not be held by a single party. This is useful for companies to provide resilience, but it’s also useful for P2P-based networks where data can stay in the hands of the participants.
For instance, if you were to host a blog the old-fashioned way, you would put up a server, expose it to the Internet (via Cloudflare :D), et voilà. Nowadays, your blog would be hosted on a platform like WordPress, Ghost, Notion, or even Twitter. If these companies were to have an outage, this affects a lot more people. In a distributed fashion, via IPFS for instance, your blog content can be hosted and served from multiple locations operated by different entities.
Web 1.0
Web 2.0
Web3
Each participant in the network can choose what they host/provide and can be home to different content. Similar to your home network, you are in control of what you share, and you don’t share everything.
This is a core tenet of decentralized identity. The same cryptographic principles underpinning cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are being leveraged by applications to provide secure, cross-platform identity services. This is fundamentally different from other authentication systems such as OAuth 2.0, where a trusted party has to be reached to assess one's identity. This materializes in the form of “Login with ” buttons. These cloud providers are the only ones with enough data, resources, and technical expertise.
In a decentralised web, each participant holds a secret key. They can then use it to identify each other. You can learn about this cryptographic system in a previous blog. In a Web3 setting where web participants own their data, they can selectively share these data with applications they interact with. Participants can also leverage this system to prove interactions they had with one another. For example, if a college issues you a Decentralized Identifier (DID), you can later prove you have been registered at this college without reaching out to the college again. Decentralized Identities can also serve as a placeholder for a public profile, where participants agree to use a blockchain as a source of trust. This is what projects such as ENS or Unlock aim to provide: a way to verify your identity online based on your control over a public key.
This trend of proving ownership via a shared source of trust is key to the NFT craze. We have discussed NFTs before on this blog. Blockchain-based NFTs are a medium of conveying ownership. Blockchain enables this information to be publicly verified and updated. If the blockchain states a public key I control is the owner of an NFT, I can refer to it on other platforms to prove ownership of it. For instance, if my profile picture on social media is a cat, I can prove the said cat is associated with my public key. What this means depends on what I want to prove, especially with the proliferation of NFT contracts. If you want to understand how an NFT contract works, you can build your own.
How does Cloudflare fit in Web3?
Decentralization and privacy are challenges we are tackling at Cloudflare as part of our mission to help build a better Internet.
In a previous post, Nick Sullivan described Cloudflare’s contributions to enabling privacy on the web. We launched initiatives to fix information leaks in HTTPS through Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), make DNS even more private by supporting Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS (ODoH), and develop OPAQUE which makes password breaches less likely to occur. We have also released our data localization suite to help businesses navigate the ever evolving regulatory landscape by giving them control over where their data is stored without compromising performance and security. We’ve even built a privacy-preserving attestation that is based on the same zero-knowledge proof techniques that are core to distributed systems such as ZCash and Filecoin.
It’s exciting to think that there are already ways we can change the web to improve the experience for its users. However, there are some limitations to build on top of the exciting infrastructure. This is why projects such as Ethereum and IPFS build on their own architecture. They are still relying on the Internet but do not operate with the web as we know it. To ease the transition, Cloudflare operates distributed web gateways. These gateways provide an HTTP interface to Web3 protocols: Ethereum and IPFS. Since HTTP is core to the web we know today, distributed content can be accessed securely and easily without requiring the user to operate experimental software.
Where do we go next?
The journey to a different web is long but exciting. The infrastructure built over the last two decades is truly stunning. The Internet and the web are now part of 4.6 billion people's lives. At the same time, the top 35 websites had more visits than all others (circa 2014). Users have less control over their data and are even more reliant on a few players.
The early Web was static. Then Web 2.0 came to provide interactiveness and service we use daily at the cost of centralisation. Web3 is a trend that tries to challenge this. With distributed networks built on open protocols, users of the web are empowered to participate.
At Cloudflare, we are embracing this distributed future. Applying the knowledge and experience we have gained from running one of the largest edge networks, we are making it easier for users and businesses to benefit from Web3. This includes operating a distributed web product suite, contributing to open standards, and moving privacy forward.
If you would like to help build a better web with us, we are hiring.