What is Web3

Web3 is a concept of decentralizing the internet. As of today, there is no clear definition of web3. We present our view on web3 as follows:

Decentralization

1. Decentralized Storage on trustless/permissionless facilities: Data is stored on distributed and permissionless storage facilities, such as IPFS, Arweave. All data, including user-generated data and the frontend source code should be hosted on decentralized storage.

2. Decentralized Logic on trustless/permissionless network: Backend centralized server is replaced by public blockchain, a distributed set of nodes that perform computation and agree on the state of the network with a consensus mechanism.

3. Decentralized Governance: The platform is governed by its own community members who can make proposals and vote. The distribution of voting rights should reflect the will of the whole community instead of that of a selected few. The voting outcome should be binding and executed immediately.

Content Ownership

1. Every user-generated data is owned by the uploader, i.e. there exists a way to digitally verify the time of upload of the content and the identity of the uploader (pubkey).

2. Web3 does not verify the authorship of the content. A hypothetical case is that Author A drafted an article on a piece of paper, and person B minted it into NFT. It does not mean that person B is the true author of the article

3. Web3 enables an alternative method for the content owner to get paid through the issue and trade of NFT

Anti-censorship

1. By default, data uploaded to the public blockchain and decentralized storage is public to everyone. As long as a connection to a node is established, the content can be retrieved.

2. Frontend (open-sourced) can determine which content to show to the user. This can be used by companies to censor illegal content (for compliance issues). However, such censorship can be easily circumvented by the user with small modifications to the open-sourced frontend.

3. Government level censorship on the content works only on the network level, but not on the application level. Taking down frontend hosted on decentralized storage or taking down smart contracts from blockchain is impossible. However, it is still possible to censor a particular IP that hosted the node or ban blockchain completely.

Privacy

1. Data on most decentralized storage is public if it is not encrypted. Transaction data on most public blockchains are public, i.e. we can see all historical transactions from a particular address.

2. Privacy can be enforced with our developed encryption pipeline. This can ensure that the uploaded content can only be viewed by a selected audiences.

Significance

1. Decentralization Governance does not rely on a single authority (company) that is accountable only to their investors (shareholders) who are most of the time, not the community members.

2. Building on decentralized storage and public blockchain shift the burden away from a few centralized servers to a distributed system of thousands of servers. The ecosystem will exist as long as the public blockchain continues to exist.