Web3
Charting the Internet's Next Economic and Cultural Frontier
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A WALL STREET JOURNAL AND GLOBE AND MAIL BESTSELLER
An essential introduction and guide to navigating the next Internet revolution—everything from the metaverse and NFTs to DAOs, decentralized finance, and self-sovereign identity—from the co-author of the international bestseller Blockchain Revolution.
The Web, and with it the Internet, are entering a new age. We’ve moved from the “Read-only Web,” which had little functionality for interacting with content, to the “Read-Write Web,” which offered seemingly endless collaborative opportunities, from sharing with our favorite people to shopping at our favorite brands. But the profusion of cyberattacks, data hacks, and online profiling have left many of us to view digital life as a Faustian bargain in need of a major rethink.
That rethink is Web3, the “Read-Write-Own Web”—a decentralized Internet where individuals own their own identities and can securely trade assets like money, securities, intellectual property, and art peer to peer. Made possible by blockchains, the foundational technology of bitcoin, Web3 promises the biggest shake up of business since the invention of double-entry bookkeeping in the Middle Ages. It is the Internet’s new frontier.
In Web3, award-winning author and technology investor Alex Tapscott provides a cutting-edge guide to the Internet’s next era. Covering everything from the metaverse and non-fungible tokens to DAOs, decentralized finance, and self-sovereign identity, this indispensable, forward-thinking book describes the building blocks and often hidden technologies that will be foundational to our cultural and economic progress.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
User ownership of digital assets is the future of the internet, according to this thought-provoking treatise. Tapscott (coauthor of Blockchain Revolution), a managing director at the Ninepoint Partners investment firm, explores the possibilities presented by Web3, a proposed vision for how the internet might evolve to become decentralized and grant users greater control over their data. According to Tapscott, tokens, or "digital assets," are the heart of this new system because they can be programmed to serve a variety of purposes (tokens representing a digital dollar, he notes, can be designed to break down into smaller units, but tokens can also be designed to remain indivisible for, say, recording a vote in an election). Web3 offers new economic opportunities, Tapscott argues, discussing how non-fungible tokens, aka NFTs—"unique digital goods" that can be bought, sold, and owned—allow artists to earn royalties on resales. The author highlights companies at the forefront of Web3, such as Decentraland, "a decentralized 3D reality platform collectively owned by its users." Tapscott excels at drawing out the wide-ranging potential of the burgeoning technology, and the straightforward explanations of how it works will be appreciated by those who don't know bitcoin from blockchains (the latter of which, he explains, are "distributed ledgers of transactions that everyone can see but no single party can alter"). This will ignite readers' curiosity.
