Before we write a single line of Solidity or deploy a single contract, we need to establish why Web3 exists at all. Every major technological shift in computing has been a response to a limitation in the previous paradigm. Web1 → Web2 → Web3 is not hype; it is a logical progression, each era solving the shortcomings of the last. Web1 refers to the internet from roughly 1991 to 2004. This was the era of static HTML pages, FTP servers, and open protocols. If you browse the web today and look at an old GeoCities archive, you get the idea: pages that you read, but could not interact with. Users were consumers of information, not producers.
Web1 was built entirely on open, public protocols:
HTTP — HyperText Transfer Protocol. How browsers request and
receive web pages. Published as an open standard.
SMTP — Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The backbone of email.
Open and interoperable by design.
FTP — File Transfer Protocol. How files moved between
machines. Anyone could build a client or server.
DNS — Domain Name System. A decentralized directory that
translated domain names into IP addresses.
The key word here is "open." Nobody owned HTTP. No corporation
could prevent you from running your own web server, sending your
own email, or building your own browser. The internet of this era
was radically decentralized at the protocol level. If you ran
your own server on your own hardware, you were genuinely
sovereign on the internet.Sovereignty came at a cost: friction. To publish on the Web1 internet, you needed: - Your own server (hardware or rented) - Technical knowledge to configure it - An understanding of DNS, HTTP headers, networking - The patience to write raw HTML For 99% of the population, this was not feasible. The internet was decentralized but inaccessible to most people. It solved the problem of censorship-resistant publishing, but it failed to solve the problem of mass participation. This gap — between the open infrastructure and the closed door of technical complexity — is exactly what Web2 exploited.
Web1's architecture is actually something we are trying to partially recover in Web3. The principle that no single entity should own the communication layer is fundamental to both. The challenge Web3 faces is the same one Web1 faced: how do you make a decentralized system genuinely usable by people who do not want to understand its internals? This tension — between decentralization and usability — is the central design challenge you will encounter when building Web3 applications. Keep it in mind throughout this course.
Web1 was decentralized by design but static by necessity. It gave us open protocols that no one owns. It failed to give us participation at scale. Its architecture is the ancestor of what we are building in Web3.
→ Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the World Wide Web
(1989) — read it to understand the original intent.
→ RFC 2616 — the HTTP/1.1 specification. Notice how openly
documented these foundational protocols are.
→ The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) — a document that captured
the cultural promise of Web1 before Web2 consumed it.Module 1: THE EVOLUTION OF VALUE
Contextualizing Web3 for Developers
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