If we summarize the evolution process of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, the following figure may be a better explanation:
The content display and connection are realized, but most functions are static and read-only. The common applications under the Web 1.0 system are mainly portals such as Yahoo! and E-mail.
Web 2.0 mainly realizes a kind of interaction between users and the network-dynamic interactive network. The rich content and information interaction provided by Web 2.0 have cultivated a large number of massive network users. The prosperity of the Web 2.0 era is mainly due to some phenomenal applications, such as FaceBook, YouTube, Linkedin, etc., which make a number of great Web 2.0 Internet giants rise.
Highly transparent and fair decentralized network, mutual trust, network effect through credible network protocols, thus emerging collective wisdom.
In the era of Web 2.0, we have seen many problems of information centralization and user data abuse. Giants such as Facebook and Google all store user data in a centralized way, so user privacy is not protected and data is abused or leaked. In this case, network credibility and decentralization become extremely important.
The prosperity of Web 2.0 is caused by interactive centralized apps such as Facebook and WeChat, so the prosperity of Web 3.0 based on blockchain must be promoted by Dapp (Decentralized Application), and a prosperous dApp ecosystem can truly support the grand vision of Web 3.0.
Blockchain technology has been proposed for many years, but it has not been widely applied to the mainstream. Therefore, we have been discussing that the biggest obstacle is the very poor infrastructure of the blockchain. In the past few years, we have seen a lot of public chain infrastructure developed, and the investment based on public chain infrastructure accounted for a large proportion of venture capital in the past, but the application of blockchain has not yet become the mainstream. Which develops first, dApp or infrastructure? From a historical perspective, the development of technology and application is an iterative process. Infrastructure promotes the development of dapp, and the development of dapp promotes the development of infrastructure.
In technology stack of Web 3.0, the definition of the third layer middleware is to help developers use the underlying protocols more conveniently, thus lowering the threshold for developers, improving efficiency and allowing developers to concentrate more on their core business.
If all the software and tools developed and delivered from Web 3.0 Layer3 middleware layer to dapp are compared with the mature cloud computing infrastructure of Web 2.0, the Layer3 middleware layer of Web 3.0 is still very thin.
In Web 2.0, AWS, Microsoft and Google provide powerful and flexible computing, storage and network for enterprises and developers all over the world, and provide rich developer tools.
In contrast, the developer ecosystem of Web 3.0 based on the underlying technology of blockchain is not very friendly, especially in the case of low and unstable network performance and throughput. This is because the * * * knowledge protocol of 1 layer represented by Ethereum and Bitcoin sacrifices performance to ensure decentralization and security. In order to solve the performance problem, many second-tier schemes have also been born.
Judging from the technology stack of Web 3.0 in the above picture, we have been paying attention to the investment of Layer 1/2, and paid less attention to Layer3. Compared with the Web 2.0 era, many leading service providers in the market, such as Alibaba Cloud, AWS and Google, have developed extremely perfect and mature middleware platforms, thus helping developers and enterprises to easily access the underlying facilities.
At present, in technology stack, because there is no unified product and middleware platform in the market, Web 3.0 developers need to build their own Dapp by building complex non-core business solutions. Moreover, because many technologies are improving and developing, the compatibility and reuse effect are not ideal, which greatly hinders the development of Web 3.0 industry and makes many people flinch. Therefore, it is urgent to develop the third-tier middleware of Web 3.0, so as to lower the threshold of developers, improve the efficiency of developers, and let developers focus more on their core business.
From the middleware market of Web 2.0, we can see that in order to help developers improve development efficiency and lower the threshold for developers, a large number of software companies such as IaaS, Paas and Saas have emerged, such as AWS, Google Cloud and ServiceNow, all of which belong to the middleware market. Compared with the Web 3.0 industry, there will be a similar platform as a service company. At present, we mainly see the following categories:
By establishing a series of standard development frameworks, development tools, languages and development libraries, developers can develop Web 3.0 app with low cost, low threshold and high efficiency, mainly including: OpenZeppelin, Truffle, Substrate, Cosmos-SDK and libp2p. This kind of middleware is difficult to be commercialized because of its particularity.
By deploying * * * knowledge nodes, developers can easily access the blockchain network, thus reducing the cost of developers. These operators include: Infura, QuikNode, BlockDaemon, Alchemy, DAppNode, etc.
The blockchain data query service provides data analysis and query services, allowing Dapp and developers to easily access the data on the blockchain. Because the events in the blockchain are triggered according to the external events, they are not saved in the blockchain. Saving and analyzing these events requires a lot of resources and energy. These service providers include: The Graph, Dune Analytics, Dfuse, Infura, SEOR, etc.
API is a standard and protocol for applications to call each other. In the era of Web2.0, API plays an important role, and the API economy has brought considerable income to the giants of Web 2.0:
More than half of Salesforce's annual revenue of $2.3 billion is generated through API;
Google processes 5 billion transactions through the API every day.
Twitter processes 654.38+03 billion transactions through API every day.
Amazon processes 1 trillion transactions through the API every day.
Web 3.0 itself emphasizes the interconnection of protocols, so API plays a very important role in it and is also the core of blockchain economy. Service providers engaged in API aggregation include: API Protocol, The Graph, Infura, SealSC, etc.
Web 3.0 industry is in the early stage of establishing a new trust infrastructure, which has great development space in the aspects of open source underlying protocols, development languages and frameworks, brand-new technology stack, trusted network protocols and so on. We see that the industry infrastructure of Web3.0 is becoming more and more mature, and the perfect third-tier middleware market will attract more excellent developers to create excellent dApp applications. These new business paradigms of Web 3.0 will also become new forms of economy, society and organization in the future, and many revolutionary blockchain application cases will be transformed into reality step by step.