Web 3.0: The Digital Ownership Revolution — Where Do We Come From?

Imagine owning a house but not having the keys to enter it. Strange, right? Yet today, our digital lives are very similar: we create content, share data, interact online, but the real control is not in our hands.

The digital transformation we are experiencing is not just about technology; it reflects a profound social change. Our lives are increasingly intertwined with the digital world, raising a fundamental question: who truly controls our virtual space?

For years, we have been passive spectators of a revolution led by others. Big tech giants have built empires on the information we produce, turning our daily interactions into monetizable assets. Today, however, things are starting to change.

Technologies like blockchain and Web3.0 are gradually shifting power from centralized platforms back to users, promising to return control over digital assets to those who create and use them. To understand how we got here, we need to take a step back and look at the history of the Internet.

Web 1.0: The Read-Only Web

From the 1990s until 2004, Web1.0 was the first phase of the Internet, often called the “read-only web”. During this period, the web was made up of static sites: pages created and updated manually, with unchanging content and little room for interaction. Users were simple spectators, like flipping through a digital book.

This rigidity had some advantages: sites loaded faster and were less vulnerable to security risks. However, the lack of active user participation was a major limitation. Content flowed in one direction only, and there were no tools to comment, share, or actively contribute.

Web 2.0: The Social Web

With Web2.0, starting around 2004, everything changed. The Internet became a lively, interactive public square. Thanks to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, anyone could become a content creator, sharing opinions, experiences, and information. This era also sparked a revolution in financial services: online banking, payment apps, and digital neobanks made managing money simpler and more immediate.

However, the promise of democratization clashed with strong centralization. Personal data, including financial data, became the core of tech giants’ profits. We traded our privacy for “free” services, handing over control of our information to a few major corporations.

Thus, Web2.0 was a crucial step toward digitalization and interactivity, but it also exposed its flaws. The concentration of power and data in few hands created new digital monopolies and fueled the need for a more open and decentralized model.

Looking back at these two eras, we can see how they laid the groundwork for the revolution that Web3.0 is now driving. In the next article, we will explore how Web3.0 is finally returning control over digital assets to users, revolutionizing the very concept of ownership in the digital world.