At the beginning of a phenomenon, it is often hard to describe what it is to others who know nothing about it. What is the internet? What is a social network? I thought about this recently when somebody asked me for my thoughts on Web3. I thought to myself, what is Web3?

My first instinct was to Google it, but I don’t think that would provide anything meaningful since it is still so early. The definitions are more descriptive and technical, which I don’t think really helps to understand how it might change the world. So I thought to myself, how would I define Web3 given what I know?

It was a very useful exercise to think through this and my definition blends a bit with the metaverse, but it gave me a nice mental framework to help process everything that is going on with Web3. I’m sure my definition will evolve over time and some may disagree with it, but I came up with three main concepts that describe what Web3 means to me and how I think will transform the way the world works in the future.

The first concept is that people will value their digital identity and goods as much as their physical identity and goods. It very well may be that some will end up valuing the digital more than the physical, but I personally believe we will need to keep a good balance between the digital and the physical for us to live productive and healthy lives.

And by identity and goods, I’m talking about cultural identity and goods. Physical identity are the clothes, the jewelry, the makeup, the watch, the coat, the hair style, the hat, the socks, the t-shirt you wear to show off your personality. Physical goods are the books on your shelf, the music in your collection, the art on your walls, the board games in your closet. All of these (and probably more) will have digital equivalents and the part that is hardest for most to comprehend is that people will value and care about all of these digital equivalents as much as they care about the physical. They are all just expressions of who you are and what you love, but represented in the digital world. And the unique part about the digital world is that the there is no physical constraint. You can wear whatever clothes you want, but more importantly you can choose to be a dog, cat, ape, or whatever species you want. You can be an alien or a robot. You can choose to be male, female, or non-binary. You can have multiple arms or two heads. Your imagination is the only limiting factor. And your digital goods also have no physical limit or even bounded by the laws of physics. There is effectively an infinite amount of space to store your collection. You can have thousands of pieces of artworks. You can have a stack of books the size of the Library of Congress. You can have a music collection that could fill a Tower Records store (remember those?). Games are probably the most evolved in the digital world as you can see with Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite. They are often how people imagine what digital identity and goods will look like. But I think that is just the beginning and a very primitive form of digital identity and goods. I predict it will evolve dramatically in the coming years as digital culture evolves with the advancement and adoption of technology.

The second concept is that the key to our digital identity and goods will be our crypto wallets. The public/private cryptographic key pair will definitively prove ownership of who we are and what we own. No central authority will be the arbiter of those wallets, everybody will be able to create and manage them by themselves, though some may choose to let a given service take custody of them. This is also a hard concept for most to truly understand, since it requires some knowledge about cryptography. But the end result is that there are no login and passwords, there is no email or phone verification. It’s just two long strings of characters and numbers, one that you share publicly and the other that you keep secret and tell absolutely no one about. Again, a very foreign concept, people will have to educate themselves and get used to it, but I believe it will be the future. A lot of innovation and technology needs to be created for this to reach mass adoption, but I do think it will happen.

The third concept is that everything of value in the digital world will be stored on the blockchain. If it’s something you directly own and if it’s something you truly value, it will be on the blockchain. Today it is cryptocurrency and NFTs, tomorrow it could be something else, but either way, it will be on the blockchain. It could be Ethereum, it could be Solana, it could be Sushi, but it will not be in a centralized database like it is today. Your identity will not be owned by Facebook or Twitter. The digital goods that you really care about won’t reside exclusively in Minecraft or Roblox. They will exist openly and publicly on the blockchain. And that last part most people will have a hard time getting used to. All of your digital identity and public goods will be public on the blockchain. You won’t be able to hide anything in the digital world, the only thing you might be able to control is the connection between your digital and physical identities. I’m still grappling with what this means for myself, but I’m sure people will come up with strategies to try and hide what they have, but in the end all transactions are public. If you are savvy enough you can figure out exactly what somebody owns and how much cryptocurrency they have, but I think the average user won’t necessarily know that and so there is a lot of work to do to educate the community and make things more transparent.

So what does this all mean?

If you value your digital identity and goods, you are going to want to have a way to show it off to your friends. This could be in a virtual space like Cryptovoxels or in a virtual gallery like OnCyber. Or you may want to share them in the physical world though displays like Infinite Objects or Tokenframe. Or you may want apps to show them on your phone, watch, or TV.

If the key to your identity is your wallet, then the security problem changes completely. It will no longer be about products like 1Password or LastPass to protect your usernames and passwords. It will be about products like MetaMask, Ledger, and Trezor. This is a big area that needs a lot of innovation to help protect and onboard new people to Web3.

And finally if everything you value in the digital world is stored publicly on the blockchain, then it completely changes the social fabric by which we interact with each other in this new digital world of Web3. I think the ramifications of this from a society standpoint is the hardest to comprehend or predict. Since the blockchain is something that nobody controls, yet everybody controls, it will be the community that will determine what will happen. And as with any new transformative technology, it can be used both for good and evil. What we do now, what we build now, what precedents we set in place now will greatly affect how this small community grows into a nation.

And I think nation is the right word to use here. If you think about how people are coming together to build and profit (yes, profit and it’s a good thing) from this new era of Web3, they are not forming companies which are then run by a management team. They are forming DAOs, which are governed by a council and proposals are voted on by the community. The fundamental structure of organizations are being changed to reflect the values of Web3, which is deeply rooted in decentralization.

So in summary, Web3 means to me:

• Digital identity and goods will be valued as much as physical identity and goods.
• The key to our digital identity and goods will be our crypto wallets.
• Everything of value in the digital world will be stored on the blockchain.

I look forward to reading this again in a few years and to see how much of it has actually come true.