Web3: The Next Internet Revolution

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of Web3, exploring its technologies, applications, challenges, and future directions, emphasizing its potential to revolutionize the internet through decentralization and user participation.

Contribution

It offers an in-depth overview of Web3, including a novel hierarchy of needs model, and discusses its relationship with Metaverse and Web 3.0, highlighting future research avenues.

Findings

Web3 enables decentralization and reduces reliance on centralized entities.

Decentralized finance promotes financial inclusion for unbanked populations.

Web3's technologies and applications are poised to transform social, economic, and digital interactions.

Abstract

Since the first appearance of the World Wide Web, people more rely on the Web for their cyber social activities. The second phase of World Wide Web, named Web 2.0, has been extensively attracting worldwide people that participate in building and enjoying the virtual world. Nowadays, the next internet revolution: Web3 is going to open new opportunities for traditional social models. The decentralization property of Web3 is capable of breaking the monopoly of the internet companies. Moreover, Web3 will lead a paradigm shift from the Web as a publishing medium to a medium of interaction and participation. This change will deeply transform the relations among users and platforms, forces and relations of production, and the global economy. Therefore, it is necessary that we technically, practically, and more broadly take an overview of Web3. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of Web3, with a focus on current technologies, challenges, opportunities, and outlook. This article first introduces several major technologies of Web3. Then, we illustrate the type of Web3 applications in detail. Blockchain and smart contracts ensure that decentralized organizations will be less trusted and more truthful than that centralized organizations. Decentralized finance will be global, and open with financial inclusiveness for unbanked people. This paper also discusses the relationship between the Metaverse and Web3, as well as the differences and similarities between Web 3.0 and Web3. Inspired by the Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, we further conduct a novel hierarchy of needs theory within Web3. Finally, several worthwhile future research directions of Web3 are discussed.