The internet evolution
The invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners- Lee might have been one of the greatest inventions of all time. At least it is one that most people all over the world use frequently on a day-to-day basis.
Before getting into the Web 3.0 term it is necessary to understand its previous web standards in terms of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. So, let’s start at the beginning.
The early stages after its invention, the world wide web was a collection of independent websites with static information. If you wanted to ‘Google’ you went to altavista.com and fill in the search term. Some results usually resurfaced and not particularly the most accurate ones. During that time, you could also chat with your friends on the popular Microsoft messenger service of MSN.
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 was initiated after people discovered some of the shortcomings of the World Wide Web. They improved upon this innovative technology by increasing the speed, that made surfing the web a lot faster. Also, a wireless internet feature called Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) was introduced. This enabled people to access the internet through a WiFi hotspot when they were out of the house and on the road. WiFi technology uses radio waves to provide network connectivity.
The sharing of information globally through the implementation of Social Media was introduced and people started sharing valuable personal information on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Partly because of the improved download and upload speed people discovered YouTube and started uploading vlogs.
In the recent years data breaches and vulnerabilities made headlines and have since had a negative effect on some of these centralized businesses that did not properly handle customers data.
What turned out to be one of the biggest successors in web 2.0 also became its main problem. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other Social Media companies became so successful that they could buy out promising start-ups and grow even bigger. Only a few companies have all the resources in terms of capital, employees and experience to force start-ups out of the market or acquire the ones with a lot of potential in an early stage.
This is a somewhat disturbing path and that’s why an improvement on Web 2.0 is necessary. People deserve a chance in bringing their innovative, bright ideas to life, without being acquired by a big company that just adds it under their umbrella of absorbed businesses to control. The answer to achieving a shift in this ongoing and emerging issue is decentralization with the help of blockchain technology.
Web 3.0
Enter Web 3.0 a new and improved version of Web 2.0 that focuses on building decentralized applications (dApps) and protocols and allows for startups to have a real and honest chance in creating decentralized real-world solutions for real-world problems.
This new internet is mainly focused on creating a decentralized protocol that enables users to interact with each other, without the need for a third-party representative to keep an eye on interactions. Another important feature to develop and implement is the sharing of user data. Data owners need to get back control of their information and get to decide if and with whom they want to share their data. The rewards for sharing data need to go towards the data owners and should not be intended for centralized entities.
How can Covalent help with the creation of a new internet?
Blockchain based start-up company Covalent is building a new internet protocol. With COVA they will reshape the world of data utilization.
What Covalent aims to do is build a new internet protocol that has its own programming language called Centrifuge. Covalent will create its own virtual machine called CovaVM and it will make use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) that will function as network nodes, validating and processing transactions on the Covalent blockchain. For the TEE and off-chain computation Covalent will initially use Intel’s Software Guard Extension (SGX).
Perhaps the two biggest problems of the current internet are centered around privacy concerns and the lack of a value network to compensate people for sharing their data. Covalent is planning to solve these problems by building a decentralized web 3.0. This new internet will consist of smart policies that can be used to extract only a predetermined set of information from the data, without endangering the privacy of data owners. Since all transactions on the network can be traced, it becomes possible to create a value network where buyers and sellers of data come together. Data buyers can acquire the use of valuable data (hence they do not buy ownership) at a fair price whereas the data seller gets rewarded each time his data is being used, without ever losing ownership of his/her data.
Covalent’s team is comprised of highly educated people with blockchain, big data and entrepreneurial experience and they have 10 team members working on the tech side of the project.
Having already raised funds from over 20 institutional investors like FBG Capital, Kenetic and Huobi Capital, Covalent does not need to worry about funding at this stage so they can focus solely on building this new internet protocol.
No further details of a public sale have emerged. I am personally looking forward to seeing some more information about this and about other tokenomics of the Covalent project.
For more information on Covalent:
Website: http://covalent.ai/index.html
Telegram: https://t.me/covalentofficial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/covatoken
Blog: https://medium.com/@covatoken
Github: https://github.com/covalent-hq
Whitepaper: https://docsend.com/view/dvvb75n
Full disclosure: This article is not intended as investment advice. It is just my personal opinion about Covalent and its COVA protocol. You should always do your own research. Covalent rewards me for writing this article and supports me in ventilating my own personal opinion.
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LindaCrypto