The World Wide Web, created in its original form by Tim Berners Lee, was designed for consuming content. With Web 2.0, the Internet was then “socialized”, and the user became a prosumer, consuming and producing content at the same time. Social media was born, and the starting signal for the platform economy was thus given. Tech giants such as Google, Facebook or Amazon, with their central data structures, celebrated great successes and broke records, not only in terms of user numbers, but also in terms of advertising sales.
Distributed ledger technologies and the blockchain are the drivers for the next evolutionary stage of the Internet, Web3, in which, in addition to read and write, ownership now also plays a central role. Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, who coined the term, describes Web3 as a “decentralized online ecosystem based on the blockchain”. In this new generation of the Internet, which is based on the principle of decentralization, concepts concerning a token-based economy are increasingly unfolding, and new trade logics are emerging.
