Web3 – A new era is emerging: “Fasten your seatbelts.”?

Now, more than ever, your Association needs to simplify and consolidate processes, procedures and protocols, and ensure access to continuing advice, as not-for-profit business models are disrupted.

Web3 is a new paradigm, based on blockchain, which can be used to record ownership of goods and claims to services, and because this information is public, ownership can be verified by anyone.

Web3 could disrupt current digital business models by offering new opportunities. Granted, new rules, legal guidelines, marketing strategies and user awareness need to be established.

Where Web1 was, for most of its users, ?read-only?, and Web2 ?read-write?, Web3 is ?read-write-own?, given new types of applications that will usurp current apps or work alongside them.

Driven by independence

Web3 was driven by users who did not want to rely on intermediaries such as banks, governments or platforms. With Web3, businesses can build products on top of open, decentralized protocols, just as they have the original internet protocols, for example, hyperlinks and email.

Web3 users can own tokens: abstract units that can represent any digital asset, and be viewed as a bearer instrument, with ownership verified by a token in a blockchain address or digital wallet. Through token ownership, users can in principle collect, trade, verify, gift, lend or pay for any asset.

Increasing decentralization

Web3 will see more decentralized structures and markets emerge. Instead of users having to access online services through platforms like Facebook, Google and Amazon, they will be able to own and govern sections of the internet themselves. Online interactions will be facilitated by tokens. This opens doors for fundamentally new user behaviours and business opportunities through decentralized market structures.

Decentralized apps (dapps) will carry out transactions by executing smart contracts run on the nodes in a blockchain network.

Wait, it?s already here

To some extent, Web3 is already here. Consider the goods already tokenized including art, music, blogs, gaming, and intellectual property rights.

For example, Time Magazine sold NFTs called TIMEPieces. Games are tokenizing playable characters or virtual wearables. Starbucks is testing loyalty points on the Polygon blockchain.

While regulators will, of course, make an effort to ‘regulate’ these innovations, the sheer pace and impact of Web3 will prove a challenge, far beyond the current efforts to regulate such things as content under current Web2 conditions.

Are you ready?

Is your Association ready? In all reality, very, very few are. But, awareness of impending change is, at least, a good starting point.?

To quote Bette Davis’ line from ‘All about Eve’, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Paul McKay CAE is senior consultant with McKay Associates. This article is based on the blog post ‘Web3: the next internet revolution’ by Harang Ju and Georgios Petropoulos, published on Brugel.org.
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