For many developers, the term Web3 feels like a buzzword — it's the sort of thing you see on a popular "Things you need to learn in 2021" tweet. As a software developer, I've spent years feeling the same way. In the last few months, I’ve taken a closer look at the Web3 ecosystem, to better understand how it works, and why it matters.
Web3 can generally be described as a decentralized evolution of the Internet. Instead of a few providers acting as the mediators of how your interactions and daily life on the web should work, a Web3-based future would liberate your data from proprietary databases and operate without centralization via the incentive structure inherent in blockchains.
The Web3 space in 2021 looks and feels much different from what it did a few years ago. Blockchains like Ethereum are handling incredible amounts of traffic with relative ease — although some improvements are needed — and newer blockchains like Solana have entered the space as genuine alternatives that could alleviate some of the scaling issues we've seen in the past few years.
Cloudflare is incredibly well-suited to empower developers to build the future with Web3. The announcement of Cloudflare’s Ethereum gateway earlier today will enable developers to build scalable Web3 applications on Cloudflare’s reliable network. Today, we’re also releasing an open-source example showing how to deploy, mint, and render NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, using Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare Pages. You can try it out here, or check out the open-source codebase on GitHub to get started deploying your own NFTs to production.
The problem Web3 solves
When you begin to read about Web3 online, it's easy to get excited about the possibilities. As a software developer, I found myself asking: "What actually is a Web3 application? How do I build one?"
Most traditional applications make use of three pieces: the database, a code interface to that database, and the user interface. This model — best exemplified in the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture — has served the web well for decades. In MVC, the database serves as the storage system for your data models, and the controller determines how clients interact with that data. You define views with HTML, CSS and JavaScript that take that data and display it, as well as provide interactions for creating and updating that data.
Imagine a social media application with a billion users. In the MVC model, the data models for this application include all the user-generated content that are created daily: posts, friendships, events, and anything else. The controllers written for that application determine who can interact with that data internally; for instance, only the two users in a private conversation can access that conversation. But those controllers — and the application as a whole — don't allow external access to that data. The social media application owns that data and leases it out "for free" in exchange for viewing ads or being tracked across the web.
This was the lightbulb moment for me: understanding how Web3 offers a compelling solution to these problems. If the way MVC-based, Web 2.0 applications has presented itself is as a collection of "walled gardens" — meaning disparate, closed-off platforms with no interoperability or ownership of data — Web3 is, by design, the exact opposite.
In Web3 applications, there are effectively two pieces. The blockchain (let's use Ethereum as our example), and the user interface. The blockchain has two parts: an account, for a user, a group of users, or an organization, and the blockchain itself, which serves as an immutable system of record of everything taking place on the network.
One crucial aspect to understand about the blockchain is the idea that code can be deployed to that blockchain and that users of that blockchain can execute the code. In Ethereum, this is called a "smart contract". Smart contracts executed against the blockchain are like the controller of our MVC model. Instead of living in shrouded mystery, smart contracts are verifiable, and the binary code can be viewed by anyone.
For our hypothetical social media application, that means that any actions taken by a user are not stored in a central database. Instead, the user interacts with the smart contract deployed on the blockchain network, using a program that can be verified by anyone. Developers can begin building user interfaces to display that information and easily interact with it, with no walled gardens or platform lock-in. In fact, another developer could come up with a better user interface or smart contract, allowing users to move between these interfaces and contracts based on which aligns best with their needs.
Operating with these smart contracts happens via a wallet (for instance, an Ethereum wallet managed by MetaMask). The wallet is owned by a user and not by the company providing the service. This means you can take your wallet (the final authority on your data) and do what you want with it at any time. Wallets themselves are another programmable aspect of the blockchain — while they can represent a single user, they can also be complex multi-signature wallets that represent the interests of an entire organization. Owners of that wallet can choose to make consensus decisions about what to do with their data.
people are talking trash about "web3" as a term,
but having all my data on multiple websites is cool
and having websites compete on interfaces for the same data is rad
— pm (@pm) September 4, 2021
The rise of non-fungible tokens
One of the biggest recent shifts in the Web3 space has been the growth of NFTs — non-fungible tokens. Non-fungible tokens are unique assets stored on the blockchain that users can trade and verify ownership of. In 2019, Cloudflare was already writing about NFTs, as part of our announcement of the Cloudflare Ethereum Gateway. Since then, NFTs have exploded in popularity, with projects like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club trading millions of dollars in volume monthly.
NFTs are a fascinating addition to the Web3 space because they represent how ownership of data and community can look in a post-walled garden world. If you've heard of NFTs before, you may know them as a very visual medium: CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club are, at their core, art. You can buy a Punk or Ape and use it as your profile picture on social media. But underneath that, owning an Ape isn’t just owning a profile picture; they also have exclusive ownership of a blockchain-verified asset.
It should be noted that the proliferation of NFT contracts led to an increase in the number of scams. Blockchain-based NFTs are a medium of conveying ownership, based on a given smart contract. This smart contract can be deployed by anyone, and associated with any content. There is no guarantee of authenticity, until you verify the trustworthiness and identity of the contract you are interacting with. Some platforms may support Verified accounts, while others are only allowing a set of trusted partners to appear on their platform. NFTs are flexible enough to allow multiple approaches, but these trust assumptions have to be communicated clearly.
That asset, tied to a smart contract deployed on Ethereum, can be traded, verified, or used as a way to gate access to programs. An NFT developer can hook into the trade event for their NFTs and charge a royalty fee, or when "minting", or creating an NFT, they can charge a mint price, generating revenue on sales and trades to fund their next big project. In this way, NFTs can create strong incentive alignment between developers and community members, more so than your average web application.
What we built
To better understand Web3 (and how Cloudflare fits into the puzzle), we needed to build something using the Web3 stack, end-to-end.
To allow you to do the same, we’re open-sourcing a full-stack application today, showing you how to mint and manage an NFT from start to finish. The smart contract for the application is deployed and verified on Ethereum's Rinkeby network, which is a testing environment for Ethereum projects and smart contracts. The Rinkeby test network allows you to test the smart contract off of the main blockchain, using the exact same workflow, without using real ethers. When your project is ready to be deployed on Ethereum’s Mainnet, you can take the same contract, deploy and verify it, and begin using it in production.
Once deployed, the smart contract will provide the ability to manage your NFT project, compliant with the ERC-721 spec, that can be minted by users, displayed on NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and your own web applications. We also provided a web interface and example code for minting these NFTs — as a user, you can visit the web application with a compatible Ethereum wallet installed and claim a NFT.
Once you've minted the NFT, the example user interface will render the metadata for each claimed NFT. According to the ERC-721 (NFT) spec, a deployed token must have a corresponding URL that provides JSON metadata. This JSON endpoint, which we've built with Cloudflare Workers, returns a name and description for each unique NFT, as well as an image. To host this image, we've used Infura to pin the service, and Cloudflare IPFS Gateway to serve it. Our NFT identifies the content via its hash, making it not replaceable with something different in the future.
This open-source project provides all the tools that you need to build an NFT project. By building on Workers and Pages, you have all the tools you need to scale a successful NFT launch, and always provide up-to-date metadata for your NFT assets as users mint and trade them between wallets.
Architecture diagram of Cloudflare’s open-source NFT project
Cloudflare + Web3
Cloudflare's developer platform — including Workers, Pages, and the IPFS gateway — works together to provide scalable solutions at each step of your NFT project's lifecycle. When you move your NFT project to production, Cloudflare’s Ethereum and IPFS gateways are available to handle any traffic that your project may have.
We're excited about Web3 at Cloudflare. The world is shifting back to a decentralized model of the Internet, the kind envisioned in the early days of the World Wide Web. As we say a lot around Cloudflare, The Network is the Computer — we believe that whatever form Web3 may take, whether through projects like Metaverses, DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) and NFTs for community and social networking, DeFi (decentralized finance) applications for managing money, and a whole class of decentralized applications that we probably haven't even thought of... Cloudflare will be foundational to that future.