What’s the distinction between web2 & web3, actually? Sure, there are tokens and preliminary coin choices and drops and discords. However, at the moment, they resemble one another fairly a bit.
Right here’s my psychological mannequin:
Think about a startup that sells sports activities playing cards. A web2 structure for this app would have 5 elements
- A transaction database: consumer 1 offered card ABC to consumer 3.
- A metadata database: consumer 1’s first identify is Samuel and his profile image is discovered at this URL.
- File storage: the profile image file is saved right here.
- App server: the code that runs the applying.
- IaaS/CDN (Infrastructure as a Service / Content material Supply Community): the servers that run code.
Evaluate this picture to a web3 structure with the web3 elements in pink.
Solely the transaction database & the file storage modified shade.
We swapped the transaction database from PostGres to a blockchain like Ethereum or Sui, and the file storage from AWS S3 to a decentralized storage supplier, maybe Filecoin or ArWeave.
Makes me marvel: If the database APIs had been the identical throughout web2 & web3, would builders or customers discover?
The remainder of the applying stays Web2, operating on Amazon, Google or Microsoft servers. Many builders construct web3 purposes this fashion: video games, exchanges, cross-chain bridges.
The remaining elements of the stack haven’t been recast as decentralized providers, but. Maybe they are going to be.
For now, the transaction database stays probably the most crucial decentralized element. That’s sufficient to confer the advantages of decentralization to customers, whereas giving engineers the instruments to construct a practical app.
