The blockchain is an invention at the foundation of the largest change in technology since the internet itself.

While most of the news cycle about blockchain centers around cryptocurrencies, the more interesting application of the blockchain is not just in the future of money, but also the future of the how the internet works. There is a fantastic article about this by Erik Torenberg titled Money Crypto vs Tech Crypto.

This paradigm shift has been dubbed Web 3. This post is intended to dive deeper into some fundamental concepts that can help us understand Web 3.

I believe many of these concepts, or some consumer friendly abstractions of them, will become well known and understood in the mainstream within a decade. Examples of such technology abstractions that almost everyone in the world knows about today are “visiting” a website (from the world of web 1.0), “connecting” with someone on social media (from web 2.0).

When I started writing this post, I intended to write about all the concepts in one post. Once I got started, it was clear that it’s too much. So, I’m going to spend the next few weeks examining the following concepts and their impact on end users.

• Decentralization - the foundational concept of the blockchain. I’ll examine how the blockchain helps fulfills the original promise of the web. I’ll look at how it will breaks down walled gardens and gives control back into the hands of the people (and why that’s important).

• Tokens and Digital Ownership - I’ll examine the incorruptibility promise of the blockchain ledger and how it inherently creates value. This gives rise to transfer and ownership of digital assets and tokens. This is how the blockchain is making money a “native function of the internet”.

• Trust and Consensus - I’ll examine the concepts of how blockchains enable market consensus, the incentives associated, how trust in decentralized networks is built, and how it can be applied more widely.

• Building Decentralized Services - In this final week, I’ll look at what this means for entrepreneurs and developers. Tokens have the potential to change the current state of the web3 development stack, with a particular emphasis of how developers today need to shift their thinking in a world of decentralized development.

There are number of amazing resources already available on all these topics, which I’ll link to during each week.