What is Web3: Making India a Global Web3 Development Hub

Web3 UPSC: Relevance

• GS 3: Science and Technology- developments and their applications and effects in everyday life.

Web3: Context

• According to a recently released report by Xpheno, specialised staffing firm, there were 13,000 crypto related jobs in India as of February 2022, which is 4.5 percent of the total active job openings.
• The report has led to discussions that entrepreneurs, developers, and startups in India will play a critical role in building global apps and platforms in the Web3, the third generation of the Internet.

What is Web3?

• Web3 is the next version of the Internet, where services will run on blockchain.
• Experts believe that Web3 will change how we use the internet.
• Some tech experts even believe that Web3 may break the world free from monopolistic control of a few tech giants.
• Since Web3 will run on blockchain technology, it will be a decentralized online ecosystem where web platforms will be owned by users and not by any centralised entity.

3 versions of Web

Web 1

• The early phase of the internet is called Web 1, or Web 1.0.
• Web1 is the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee. The era of ‘Read-Only Web’, lasted roughly from 1989 to 2005.
• It was a time when the internet was actually decentralised and one could navigate to individual static webpages, unlike now when we type a word in Google search and find thousands of pages related to the topic.
• In the first phase of the internet, the only way to create a website was by writing codes.

Web2

• Web 2, or Web 2.0, is what we are living through now.
• In comparison to Web1, Web2 is more interactive with user-generated content and interoperability.
• The internet is centralised, mainly dominated by players like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and is regulated in a limited way by the governments.
• Here, one does not need to write codes to create a webpage. Websites can be created just by buying a domain, creating a page and the website is live.
• In the tech world, Web 1 is usually called static web and Web 2 is called social web.

Web3

• According to Chris Dixon of venture capital firm a16z, Web3 combines the best of both worlds; the decentralised ethos of Web1 with the interaction of Web2.

Web3 jobs in India

• The report by Xpheno said that with huge demand, salaries are going as high as Rs 78 lakh per annum for people with close to 10 years of experience.
• A buzzword until recently, multiple projects have come up in just the last few months, and more investments have been flowing into the country.
• Reports say that Web3 can help India contribute $1.1 trillion to its GDP in the next 11 years.
• With overlap in the skills, which includes blockchain, security engineer and machine learning experts, there is a huge demand for Web3 related jobs in the country.
• Experts believed that India is positioned uniquely to take the benefits from Web 3.0 as India has a large pool of startups, developers, and one of the largest internet consumers markets in the world.

Web3 criticism

• He idea of Web3 is not without criticism.
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk says Web 3 is not real and seems more marketing buzzword than reality.
• Even former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey has questioned whether Web 3 will be as free and open as many hopes. He said that people will not own Web 3. The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.

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