preface
Twitter, as a social giant, finally fell into Musk's hands, starting the evolutionary journey from Web 2 social platform to Web 3 social protocol. Under a series of drastic reform processes, we can vaguely see the general direction of the future: introducing more blockchain technology, enhancing Twitter's ability to generate revenue, reducing the financial burden caused by useless redundant staff, etc.
But this is not the whole story. There is more than one way to implement the Web 3 social protocol. There is at least one way to reconstruct the decentralized network from scratch and then create a native decentralized social protocol from it. If Twitter is an incremental reform, then Jack Dorsey's Web 5 is a revolutionary reconstruction.
After Jack Dorsey quit the Twitter board in May this year, he devoted himself to Bitcoin. He used the name of his other company, the payment platform Block (formerly known as Square), to support the development team of the Lightning Network and the more ambitious Web 5 network developers. Block's total net revenue in the third quarter was US$4.52 billion, a year-on-year increase of 17%, of which Bitcoin transactions were US$1.76 billion and gross profits totaled nearly US$37 million.
On June 11, 2022, Jack Dorsey announced at the Consensus conference that he would build the Web 5 decentralized network platform, which will become the next-generation network infrastructure, directly replacing the current Web 2 and Web 3 concepts, and is therefore also called Web 2 + Web 3 = Web 5.
At present, five months have passed, and the Web 5 platform developed by TBD, a subsidiary of Block, has gradually taken shape. It has completed the deposit and withdrawal experimental cooperation with Circle, and the construction of the currency layer using the Lightning Network to access Bitcoin. The various elements of Web 5 have basically taken shape, including DID, DWN (decentralized node), DWA (decentralized network application) and so on.
The latest progress is the release of VC (Verifiable Credentials) on October 18. So far, a basically complete network facility has been completed, and it is completely different from the model of cryptocurrency plus on-chain projects. Instead, it is an overall construction of the original meaning of the Web, the "network". This is also the most eye-catching highlight of Jack Dorsey's version of Web 5. In addition, as a Bitcoin maximalist, Jack also chose Bitcoin rather than Ethereum for construction.
Web 5 as understood by Jack Dorsey
Around Bitcoin, Jack Dorsey has made a combined layout at Block, in which the payment company Block is responsible for Bitcoin payments, its subsidiary Spiral is responsible for the Bitcoin Lightning Network Development Kit LDK and the Bitcoin Development Kit BDK, and TBD is responsible for Web 5 built on the Bitcoin currency layer.
Rather than saying that the next generation of the network is Web 5, it is better to say that Bitcoin is introduced into the network and its data ownership is transformed. This is also what the original Bitcoin wanted to do but did not complete. Jack Dorsey is worthy of being the most staunch Bitcoin believer after Satoshi Nakamoto.
In Jack Dorsey's business empire, Block is the company entity that actually generates revenue. Its Cash App is already a mainstream Bitcoin payment application, with quarterly transaction volume stable at more than US$1.5 billion. It can currently support Bitcoin salary payments and use the Lightning Network for transfers and other operations.
The Web 5 development being carried out by another company, TBD, is, to some extent, connecting the existing Cash App and development tools such as LDK and BDK to promote the expansion of Bitcoin application scenarios, and then allow Web 5 to occur on the Bitcoin network. Last year, it launched the white paper for tbDEX, a trading platform based on the Bitcoin network.
Jack Dorsey previously believed that the current Web 3 is a term that is like a cuckoo occupying the magpie's nest. It is a premature baby that is coerced and matured by VC funds, and has little to do with the network we are familiar with. Correspondingly, Elon Musk is also a Web 3 skeptic at this stage. More typically, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, believes that cryptocurrency is not all of Web 3.
Therefore, it must be clear that Jack Dorsey’s ideal Web 3 or Web 5 must first be a network facility. The ability to communicate and exchange is its first characteristic. Secondly, it must be isolated from VC to a large extent. The best way is to do it in an open source manner to maximize the openness of the network.
The application layer built on it, such as the future decentralized social protocol, should be a network communication model in which data is disposable, relationships are transferable, and identities are identifiable, which is highly different from today's social platforms.
Therefore, everything developed by Jack Dorsey is an open source project, which is also the most consistent successor to the open source spirit of the Web 1.0 era. A global project similar to Linux is the next generation of the Internet he dreams of.
It can be seen that for Jack Dorsey, the word Web 5 itself is not that important, nor is its relationship with Web 3, or whether Web 4 specifically refers to mobile Internet, as important as the essential characteristics of Web 5: a network where data belongs to users is the essential meaning of the concept of Web 5.
The social media built on it should also spread from the perspective of network communication and social relations. It can be called the native social model of Web 5, rather than an imitation and migration of current social relations. From this perspective, we can explore what the future network and the DWA (decentralized network application) built on it will look like.
After clarifying the implications and essential characteristics of the concept, the next step is to explore the current development progress. Thanks to the open source uilld method, PANews is able to actually observe the entire process of Web 5 development.
Web 5 Architecture: A Decentralized Web Development Platform
In TBD's development concept, Web 5 is a network communication facility and the most basic model of the Internet. It is itself a network. The current World Wide Web is the counterpart of Web 5, not the Layer 1 public chain like Ethereum or Bitcoin. This is also where it is most easily misunderstood.
Internally, it can be divided into the DID/Wallet part as the entry function and the verification suite as the VC (verifiable credential) part. Information flows securely between DWNs (decentralized nodes), and these are uniformly constructed into DWP (decentralized network platform).
Above the network is DWA (decentralized web application), while Bitcoin, Lightning Network and Circle constitute the real cryptocurrency circulation module, which can truly link cryptocurrency and network communication. This is also the real way for Web 5 to combine the two.
DID: front-end anonymization
Decentralized identifiers are an international standard of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) for identifiers created, owned and controlled by individuals without relying on a centralized entity.
In TBD's design, DID can be embedded in a crypto wallet as the front end and entrance for individual users to enter the decentralized network. As Vitalik said, it is meaningless to conduct KYC on the DeFi front end. It can neither organize hackers and project parties who really do evil, nor will it make users feel uneasy. Decentralization should organize security measures in a decentralized manner.
Wallets are the best carriers for realizing DID functions, and the identity of value and information is a typical feature of Web 5. Only front-end anonymization can ensure the decentralization of the entire network from the source. From this perspective, DID is the successor of Tor, Linux and Bitcoin.
VC: Decentralized Credentials
VC (Verifiable Credentials) verifiable credentials require network nodes to verify when receiving information to ensure that the correct original information is transmitted.
Credentials are not uncommon in real life, such as our common ID cards and driver's licenses. In the current Internet, electronic signatures and CA certificates are mainly used, such as websites and emails, to prove their credibility.
The main problem with these certificates is not their low security, but the control that centralized authentication mechanisms have over individuals. For example, Zlibrary was banned by the US government on November 4, and has basically lost its ability to connect to the Internet. Corresponding to this are many other websites, such as the scientific research literature sharing platform Sci-Hub.
In essence, VC still verifies information, but it does so through decentralized nodes rather than a centralized entity.
From a process perspective, after the user uses DID to verify himself, VC will verify the information sent by the holder, so as to achieve the same anonymity of the sender and the information. For example, JPMorgan Chase recently conducted DeFi operations and used VC to allow only authorized addresses to access their wallets.
DWN: secure information flow
DID and VC are the preparatory stages for information transmission, while DWN (Decentralized Web Node) is responsible for the security of the information transmission process. The three are integrated to form the so-called DWP (Decentralized Web Platform).
In essence, DWN is a decentralized data storage and message relay node. Users can have multiple nodes and keep information flowing securely within the node in an anonymous state.
DWA: Another way to apply in the future
Above the network layer, there will also be corresponding application organization methods, such as DWA (Decentralized Web App) defined by TBD, which is essentially a decentralized transformation of existing web pages.
If the front-end and back-end that the network relies on are decentralized, then web pages are naturally decentralized as well. The question here is what kind of model the future application will be?
DAPP, relying on public chains or various Layer 2 DWAs, relying on the decentralized network built by Web 5 Mobile APP, relying on hardware terminals such as mobile phones, but will be decentralized, such as Solona mobile phones or iOS APPs that support NFT standards VR APP, relying on VR terminals developed by Meta and others, and running on them
The current trend is that DAPP is hot in the crypto world, mobile apps have the largest number of users, VR devices are mainly used in the gaming field, and DWA is still in its infancy. It can only be said that this will be a long-term competitive landscape.
Is Web 5 the future of decentralized social networking?
Bitcoin may not belong to anyone, but it must belong to Jack Dorsey. Over the years, he has promoted Bitcoin with a religious enthusiasm and is one of the few builders who has worked diligently on business construction and technology development for the Lightning Network and payments. Even Web 5 has chosen Bitcoin as its value layer.
Looking at the history of the development of the Internet, GUI (graphical user interface) replaced the terminal command line, and mobile Internet replaced the desktop browser. Of course, this replacement is more like an inclusion rather than a complete replacement. It is just a question of who occupies the mainstream in the development model and commercialization process.
So the question we need to answer is how to organize social networking next. There are currently three schools and paradigms: the Lens Protocol replication model, the Twitter/Mask transformation model, and the most basic Web 5 native model.
Twitter has 400 million users, and its every move will have a huge impact on the social model. The Lens Protocol re-implements the existing social model using blockchain, and Web 5 launched by TBD is thinking about the next generation of the network in a decentralized way.
This logic can be deconstructed into: first build the network itself, and then a native protocol will be born on it, thus completing the merger of the existing network. This is also the story of Web 1 -- Web 2 -- Web 3. Following the new route architecture diagram, Ethereum is currently aiming for 100,000+ TPS to support the daily use of crypto-native applications.
Of course, under the current actual circumstances, Web 5 itself is still under construction and the applications on it have not yet really started running, but looking at the historical trends, this is still a direction worthy of attention, and may even fundamentally change the current encryption world.
The current competition between public chains and Dapps places more emphasis on finance and security, with less support for the functions of the network itself, such as communication and connection. TBD's Web 5 development has explored this aspect to a considerable extent, and this will also be a long-term direction.