The technology of data, networks, and 3D visuals has grown so much over the past decade that many people and businesses are now in the early stages of building the next generation of web experience. They call it Web3, unlike the current Internet experience (Web 2.0). It’s still too early to tell what this experience might bring, but many are hoping for a more decentralized experience where users have more ownership over their digital assets and the data they generate.
Three tech entrepreneurs from the Web3 space discuss the fundamental differences between Web3 and our current internet experience during a panel discussion held Sept. 26 at the Beyond Expo 2022 technology conference, held online at BEYOND Metaverse. They are Wilson Wei, founder and CEO of social graph protocol CyberConnect; Eric Liu, founder and CEO of digital clothing design software company Style3D; and Suji Yan, founder and CEO of Mask Network, a portal that allows users to use decentralized applications on traditional social media platforms.
The text below has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Wilson Wei, Founder and CEO of CyberConnect
We don’t have ownership of internet assets in the age of Web 2.0, and thanks to blockchain technology, we do now [in Web3]. For the first time, users will be able to own their own items in a completely decentralized way, without any sort of centralized party granting them the right to own assets. That’s why we build the social protocol to get data, especially important data like social graph data, back into the hands of users.
In the era of Web 2.0, there are many important social data. For example, you know how Facebook login was so powerful when they opened the API, and in China WeChat login is super powerful. For users, when you log in different scenarios and sometimes you are allowed to transfer your social graph to the other app but sometimes not. A lot of people don’t really know why. The reason is that you do not have this data at all.
Centralized platforms, where you spend years building your social graph, own all the data you created on their platforms. And that’s a problem.
For content creators, like all YouTubers who spend years making a living on YouTube, they have absolutely no bargaining power against the platform because they don’t own any data and they have no ability to migrate easily to another platform. If they try to create another account on another new media platform, they will have to start over. That’s a huge problem for status mobility or social capital mobility, and it wasn’t possible before in Web 2.0 because the infrastructure is purely centralized.
I think owning your social status is the key, and also, we’ll have to build the infrastructure to allow users to build their status in a way that they own it. And that’s what I think, other than crypto assets, that’s the most important thing that differs from Web 2.0 to Web3.
Eric Liu, Founder and CEO of Style3D
We’re in the fashion business, and before it was a physical fashion business, now it’s a digital fashion business.
Copyrighting trendy digital assets will be much easier than Web2. The whole decentralization can generate copyright-based digital content at a low cost, make it more convenient, create more convenient transactions, and generate more profits.
In the physical world, we mainly use computers to solve pain points. For example, we provide our core products, such as 3D digital product software and digital asset management platform and online collaboration platform and others. But in the virtual world, what we can provide is the virtual 3D clothing and fashion infrastructure, such as the technology and application of 3D design and modeling and the 3D digital content itself.
We are trying to connect the physical world and the digital world through digital twin technology, and we hope that whether it is digitizing the physical world or rendering the 3D world, we will be the provider of the technology and underlying content as long as you want to create something trendy.
Suji Yan, Founder and CEO of Mask Network
The decentralized social network is like the public forum of ancient Rome. This is Web3 Rome and in every aspect Web 2.0 and the current ecosystem we live in has failed us at some point and it hasn’t improved in the last 10 years since the internet mobile has emerged. So I think that’s something we’re going to change.
Decentralization rebuilds social consensus. I believe that in the next 20 years, a new type of social consensus will form in this crypto war against the regulatory community. And we are going to have new laws established during these DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), during the creation of these DAOs.
You don’t want a single point of failure, which could happen at any time and cause your asset to fly or just disappear. Decentralization could contribute to this. It also means that the consensus comes from the community, from the crowd, from a decentralized and impartial group of decision makers, or from machines. That kind of level of trust is what decentralization could provide that a centralized party could never provide.
Even though [a centralized party] is a big business. It’s a great product. It’s a great team, you know, companies like Google, it’s a great brand. They said “do no evil”, but it’s still do no evil. It’s not like you can’t do wrong. Decentralization cannot do evil and cannot be evil. You don’t have to trust anyone; you just trust the coding, the virtual machine, the blockchain, and it will promote so much more productivity when we collaborate in all aspects because of trust.
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