As the sun sets over the Italian skies, those crossing the bridges between Rome and the Vatican are treated to an unparalleled view. High above the ancient towers of the cityscape, huge flocks of birds take flight, numbering in the thousands. I’ve been lucky enough to see them spin and dance up there, a tapestry of movement: fast, unpredictable, utterly beautiful. These birds, as I have since learned, are starlings, and the flock they form is called a ‘murmur’.

I am surprised by the decentralized order within these formations. A gossip is a sight to behold and demands contemplation. It is a marvel that speaks to the very essence of what it means to be alive and one of many examples of the majesty of nature.

In this organized chaos I find analogues. A whisper is made up of hundreds of nodes, each of which comprises seven birds. Despite the complexity of the mass, each bird only needs to look at and react to its six nearest neighbors. There is no leader or central authority, yet the herd functions as a whole. I look at these decentralized bodies and feel an affinity.

If a predator appears, the attacked node breaks off and distracts the attacker, while the larger group continues its tumbling trajectory, in an unperturbed flight pattern. To the untrained eye, the event appears random, but in reality, these birds build a cohesive framework, a living mosaic made all the more impressive by the lack of a central guiding hand. As I watch this living mass pirouette in the sky, my thoughts turn to Web3.0.

Web3.0, like gossip, remains a somewhat loose subject grouping. Some consider the concept too ephemeral and broad, lacking in form. Others believe that the notion is an innate human truth, implicitly understood, waiting to be recognized by the masses. Whatever your stance, for now it remains a novel but undeniably powerful move in wait.

Web3.0 is a smorgasbord of concepts. Decentralized information and power structures, greater trust, truth and transparency, greater autonomy, the foundations of a new industrial age and more. Web3.0 is a paradigm shift that restructures the foundations of the Internet and offers a new philosophical model for technologies, business and society. It’s an evolutionary leap both in terms of technology and thought process, but very logical in its progression.

The Internet Bill of Rights was based on the notion of freedom, equality, dignity, and uniqueness at the individual level, yet today’s Internet has deviated significantly from that vision. Web3 returns to this vision, empowering citizens through data and information, embracing the idealized vision of the roots of the Internet.

The evolution of the web can be broadly defined by technological eras. In the so-called ‘Web 1.0’, the Internet fulfilled the purpose of the bulletin board in the town square. The participants were passive receivers of information, connected to messages with the main action of “reading” and receiving information.

In Web1.0, the connection is the priority and the users are passive.

In Web 2.0, the Internet became a shared workspace and here interaction and participatory creation became the main feature. In this phase, we witnessed the rise of jargon such as “user-generated content” and saw dominant players in the Internet age, such as Google and Amazon, emerge.

The mass adoption of mobile computing technology in the early 2010s accelerated new waves of adoption and led to even faster development and adoption rates, allowing users to connect anywhere. Here, we gave rise to the notion of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT): always online, interconnected, allowing for much greater coordination and information that paints a bigger picture than was possible on an individual level.

In Web2.0, mobility is the priority and users are interactive, connecting people and entities in the name of co-creation.

To date, the Internet has brought out a lot of good things, but not without bugs. We have modeled the Internet on the hierarchical systems that have governed society since the birth of agrarianism: top-down, centralized, excessively dependent on external power structures and arbiters of truth.

Inevitably, this approach manifests inequality and inefficiency. Greed and bad faith practices have contributed to the conditions we see today, however, looking at it in a larger context, this passage was necessary. Sometimes we must stumble before we learn to walk. In the case of the Internet, find the values ​​we hold most dear as a society: truth, transparency, trust.

Technology is finally becoming powerful enough to break these longstanding power structures and offer new trends towards the empowerment of the majority. With the exponential growth of the volume of web data, 2.5 quintillion bytes per day in 2020, for example, a revision of its architecture was inevitable. Blockchain becomes inevitable. If it wasn’t Satoshi Nakamoto who conceived of Bitcoin and blockchain technology, surely someone else would have recognized the same need for this revolution in data management.

With blockchain technology set to become a core facet of the Internet’s infrastructure, it naturally paves the way for Web 3.0. Therefore, the Internet will be irrevocably associated with the characteristics of distributed ledger technology. That is, transparency, security and immutable ownership of data and things, something I like to express as “shared collective utility of resources”.

In this new era, data generated by human behavior becomes the ultimate shared resource and one of our most valuable actionable assets.

The participants in this new web iteration, like the previous ones, will continue to evolve with it and, at the same time, define it. This new generation of users, whether they were born in it or become “veterans” like me, become the “owners” of this new website. We can say it with confidence, because we will use it to achieve individual, collective impacts. Rather than simply being users, we participate and become mutually accountable partners.

Of course, it would be naive to claim that everyone will bear the same responsibility or reap the same rewards. Achieving fairness and egalitarianism is much more complicated than producing averages derived from arithmetic. But hopefully, the blockchain and the various tools that arise from it will help us in the pursuit of this vision, which is described accordingly:

• A common consensus reached and embraced by willing people who share the same passions and goals.
• Tokens as incentives to coordinate motivation and aptitude
• Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to enable collaborations within and between organizations more effectively, allowing all voices to be heard and voted on, without being stifled by a lack of transparency.
• NFTs will become digital identities for both people and things, fulfilling the function of accumulating data and embodying accumulated value.
• Vastly enhanced capabilities born from the combination of blockchain with technologies like IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc.

Summarizing, we can say: Web3.0 is a phygital (physical-digital) ecosystem driven by Blockchain technologies and the actions of people, who collectively achieve agreed goals.

People at Web3 are active stakeholders, whose mission must be treated equally and collaboratively by all actors, be they platforms, corporations, associations, individuals, or even government agencies.

The priority of Web 3.0 is the focus on the identification of common consensus and the collaborative execution of protocols.

The transformation of an idea is very similar to the growth of a child; gradual and steady. We can easily miss small changes along the way, but then one day see them in their entirety and gasp “when did they get so high?”

Slowly, silently, then suddenly. This is the nature of progress.

After reading my thoughts, I’m excited to share that VeChain has been building towards something truly innovative in recent years and we’re almost ready to reveal the fruits of our labor. We have always focused on the future and continue to move towards a blockchain-powered reality.

Our high profile announcement coming in the coming months has the potential to solidify and positively shape the Web3 industry by offering something tangible to join. To be sure, 2022 was a difficult year for the space, marred by many scandals, but we are bucking that trend by taking revolutionary applications of technology into the mainstream.

We want everyone to be part of this new digital future: prosper, grow and benefit together. This is a rare opportunity to be a part of something truly special, to be a part of the VeChain blockchain-powered revolution. We call on our many committed members, builders and organizers to join us on this exciting journey and play their own role as equal players in this web3 future.

Let’s make it happen together.

Let’s be proud to be this amazing team and finally start the future.

The VeChain Foundation, based in San Marino, Europe, is the non-profit organization behind the development of VeChainThor, a world-leading smart contract platform that is spearheading real-world adoption of blockchain technology.

Leveraging the capabilities of ‘trustless’ data (information without intermediaries), smart contracts and IoT technologies, VeChainThor has provided solutions in a wide range of fields, and now turns its attention to arguably the biggest challenge of all: creating technologies and ecosystems to drive true sustainability and digital transformation on a global scale.

Visit https://www.vechain.org for more information.