Will Web 3 become a Fate or a Fad? What are we missing now?

Since the 1990s, the Internet has started infiltrating our daily lives and proliferated throughout the world. Developers spent the first 10 years developing the initial Internet Web 1.0, then took another 10 years to cultivate human behavior from paper usage to digitalization. Before the appearance of the blockchain, everything is almost dominated by Web 2.0. As long as you are willing to dedicate your creation to the platform supplier, you can generate your digital content easily and interact with others on the Internet at any time you want. With more than 20 years of Internet development, the foundation of Web 2.0 has been well-established and even reached a bottleneck for further advancement. Fortunately, the appearance of blockchain is considered by many as an evolution of Web 2.0 and enables an era of Web 3.0.

The concept of Web3 was first proposed by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014, stating a decentralization of the Internet ecosystem and releasing the power back to the users. All the digital information in Web3 is not stored in data centers but in the users’ digital wallets; transactions or data transference are organized into blocks and transparently recorded on distributed ledgers. With the empowerment and the capabilities of Web3, users now can have more leading power and authority over their data and thus, the value of the data is dominated by the users but not any other third parties. You coin the value of your digital data through tokenization. These innovative ideas and technology started getting attention after cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) went viral in the middle of 2021. Numerous celebrities and enterprises like Snoop Dogg, Tyga, HSBC, and Nike have also entered the NFT space and metaverse. As a result, the market for NFT and crypto skyrocketed to $41 billion and 2.6 trillion in 2021 respectively. Undoubtedly, the trend and the development of Web 3 is a fad in the contemporary world.

For believers, Web3 represents the next phase of the Internet revolution, or even part of our social fabric in the future — a decentralized internet utopia, censorship, and manipulation would be the things of the past. With Web3, data is utilized more fairly and can benefit its owners financially by providing content or contributing to the community. On the other hand, there is not possible for all Web2 users to embrace Web3 readily at the moment. Web3 is still significantly immature comparing Web 2 in many aspects. Web3 promised us a new era of cyber security using smart contracts and blockchain consensus algorithms, but in fact, it is more like a theoretical ideology so far. There are many cases of Web3 users suffering from phishing, losing their valuable NFTs and cryptos suddenly with a clueless look on their faces. Scammers remint their NFT JPEG into a new NFT for selling or even sending free tokens and NFT to grant access to control people’s wallets after acceptance.

Axie Infinity, a famous P2E game with 2 million daily users, encountered its largest security disaster when the hacker found a backdoor to take control over the validators and drain $552 million equivalent tokens at the time. The blooming market of cryptocurrencies and NFT entices not only investors and developers, but also cybercriminals who want to take advantage of this infant technology. In the first quarter of 2022, there were almost 700 million stolen by hackers without any clues to track back the money. Scammers or hackers frequently caught the spotlight in everyday news and such incidents were exaggerated by web2 media that further making traditional people avoid taking a step into this new technology.

Since the decentralized nature of networks in Web3, every action we take on Web3 can be without regulations by any authorities. That is one of the main reasons why cybercriminals are very furious about Web 3. Even if the legal protection is in there to offer a layer of security in a physical aspect, the anonymous access can still eliminate the effectiveness of this layer of protection, where complaints are a more common way to ‘tackle’ the cybercriminals than compensation. Without identifying the personally identifiable information, Web3 users are the ones that can access the digital data of the particular wallet but cannot claim the actual right of its ownership. To state it simply, if you accidentally reveal your password and the recovery phrases of your digital wallet to others, how can you declare the ownership of your NFT? The NFTs belong to that wallet address, but they do not belong to you in a legal or real-world definition. Let alone the user experience of Web3 which is fraught with operational frictions and user-interface frustrations. The lack of interoperability of assets across different blockchains can leave them not only with a headache but also fundamentally at an impasse. Web3 users should instead have the capacity to own and control multiple digital wallets on their personal devices, wallets, and control authentications for different decentralized applications (Dapps), or for control of digital assets like NFTs as may be built on different blockchain networks. The more wallets that the users own, the higher the risk that each or all may be exposed, particularly under this cybercriminal trend taking advantage of comparatively easy access in existing pseudo-anonymous accounts across Web3. As such, it will be a bit reckless and impulsive to pursue the goal of massive mobilization on the future of everyday lives, provided that the current state of Web3 is maintained using insufficient yet widely accepted security standards.

Nonetheless, does that mean Web2 is still the perfect solution for all users? Not really. Although Web2 has brought the world a seamless user experience and initially free access to a glut of data, the general public has started to become cognizant that the services which Web2 provides were not truly “free”. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Tech giants and more centralized monopolistic operations each supervise and then actively harvest their users’ personal data, essentially stalking their online behavior so as to customize the most pertinent or impactful forms of advertisements, delivered across their known app interfaces. This user data as harvested by Web2 operations frequently is sold and/or revealed to other companies, each for their own business purposes. Facebook, currently called Meta, was charged a $5 billion fine due to its violation of such user data and privacy laws. Yet the trend largely continues. Moreover, the content creators themselves, those contributing to these Web2 destinations, typically do not own their creations. The Web2 platform does. These more centralized online sites often use the content created by their users for profit, it is positioned to attract other users and of course, advertisers.

As another example, YouTube also takes 30 percent of channel membership revenue from the creators, while the audiences are forced to watch the platform-delivered ads before accessing the content. This setup adversely affects both creators and their audiences. The problems mentioned above are complicated. Even though Web3 may seem to have a lot of loopholes, it is after all still just a burgeoning technology, it retains the astonishing potential to entirely disrupt the internet space as we currently know it. With a comprehensive solution to address these and other persistent problems, the development of Web3 can flourish and accelerate. It seems that NEST® offers that accelerator and is an application built to be able to confidentially handle the user’s Web3 requirements properly.

As discussed, most of the problems on Web3 arise in three dimensions: inauthentic identities, cyber breaches, and typically cumbersome user access to new blockchain technologies or networks. Foreseeing these obstacles, NEST® is committed to constructing a robust system to facilitate user-led and user-owned personal information and thereby reshape the entire Web3 industry. NEST® is an all-in-one Zero-Trust Architecture application, specializing in Self-Sovereign Distributed Identification [SSDID], instant data-asset creations or registrations like NFTs, hyper-encrypted data storage, and verified provenance authentication.

Nowadays, none of the Web 3 wallets can guarantee the ownership of your digital asset. While confidential autonomy is a prerequisite for Web3, unlike the physical world, there is no way to prove the user’s identity. To solve this contradiction, NEST® has developed a bespoke SSDID protocol solution allowing each user to confidential proves real-world ownership control. With this, users’ digital assets across varied networks like Ethereum, Binance, Polygon, Solana, and Ava can instantly be secured. While holding the SSDID, users can set their personal, hyper-encrypted digital to real-world identity to sign, encrypt and control their digital assets. The secured environment and personalized, device-side encryption protect them from fraud and hacking, as all transactions across any utilized DLT or blockchain network confidentially leverage ad-hoc authentication through the SSDID, from its owner. These encrypted entries and transactions then become GDPR and privacy compliant as they are publicly visible yet only privately decryptable, permitting the user-led or self-selected disclosure of all activities without third-party capacities to reverse engineer source or origin i.e., individual user identification.

Leveraging a bespoke layer-zero-to-one, Proof of Authority blockchain with 40 active primary nodes and first-of-its-kind device-as-a-node validation, encrypted data storage is safely secured with SSDID and held in quantum-proof containers. These containers are splintered, distributed DLT networks that are further hosted or held by the users. NEST® emphasizes the term ‘distributed’ identification, as it is the only true way to gain genuine ownership control, with regional compliance, in a decentralized system. No one except the owner, not even the NEST® team, can decrypt the content or reveal an SSDID.

The sophisticated access to Web3 ecosystems and tools is also another huge concern. NEST® realizes the importance of a seamless user experience, one that is accustomed to using Web2 services, so a breakthrough one-stop Web3 service is developed for the mainstream or public market. Users can not only transact using cryptos or fiat currencies, so as to say create their NFTs by simply clicking, but their NEST® wallet also holds the ability for them to instantly swap their digital assets across different blockchains. Web3 users now no longer need to download multiple wallets on the desktop. Everything is managed through a single, hyper-secured mobile application. Apart from the unique NFT generator, NEST® has the largest on-chain artificial intelligence (AI), the library which is able to, in seconds, verify the authenticity of both classical and digital artwork before minting content into an NFT on any network. A provenance certificate is distributed to the authenticated NFT owners after minting, providing a form of proof and real-world ownership of digital assets. These safeguards and authentications mean that scammers cannot just copy and paste an original NFT — such can be recognized by the NEST® and generation of the token itself prevented before being deployed.

When Web3 users choose their digital wallet, all they may consider is the wallet’s safety and convenience. NEST® as an innovative Web3 wallet, however, is much more novel than this. Apart from excellent performance on genuine decentralization, personalized encryption, scam prevention protocols, and cross-chain interoperability, NEST® also supports a form of social engagement in the blockchain space. It allows instant on-chain social media posting and hyper-secured end-to-end encryption on messaging, voice, and video calling. Under this social media v2.0, again, no one, not even the team, can interrupt users’ content creation, ensuring censorship-free capacities for contributions and review. What’s more, content creators may earn VLRY as a form of passive income, by receiving donations from fans. Unlike the Web2 social media platforms, content creators can be directly and fully rewarded without exploitation. Try to pick up one of the Web3 wallets on the current market, none of them is capable to combine the mentioned features into a single application, not even Metamask, Trust Wallet, or Exodus. It is not overstating the situation to state that NEST® is demonstrating a genuine, all-in-one application on Web3.

Web3, at this stage, is still a gray zone that is unfortunately and only presently full of various types of scams. Recently, MetaMask, which is at the moment the world’s leading non-custodial crypto wallet, plans to recruit an investigative firm called Asset Reality to help the victims get forensic investigation against fraudulent operations. Using a centralized method to deal with the decentralized problem, frankly speaking, this kind of investigation is not practical to recover what they have lost.

Web3 users need fundamental, real-world protection with personalized encryption which necessarily comes with interoperable choice selection for control of their digital assets and transactional exchange. NEST® has already embarked on its journey, setting off a revolution in Web3. Hence, it is worth looking into how NEST® will lead Web3 towards a mature, trusted, confidential and decentralized ecosystem. With NEST® and Web3, we can choose to define our future.