With the recent promulgation by Silicon Valley of the age of ‘Web 3.0’, one needs to pick apart what is being said with such a statement in order to not simply become a victim of a new marketing pitch without anything of value being offered. 

The evolution of the Web 

In essence the 3 of Web 3.0 relates to the versioning of the ‘world wide web’, the ubiquitous www.

Just as all software goes through its iterative phases from a 0.1 alpha phase to version 1.0 or 2.0, the web has gone through several iterative phases as well.  

In a general sense, Web 1.0 could be considered the era that arose with the development of the web browser allowing people to navigate the various private and enterprise servers of the Internet.  

Web 2.0 could be considered the rise of the ‘cloud’ whereby users had access to a rich array of services without the overheads of hosting their own data on a server.  

Web 3.0 and blockchain  

To date there hasn’t really been a clear articulation of what is being offered with Web 3.0.  

Many have inferred that Blockchain technology will be a critical component for ushering in the Web 3.0 paradigm. However, if the particular blockchain that is utilised is not very useful, then what use will be any solution that leverages it?  

Blockchain considerations for Web 3.0 

The BSV blockchain is a hybridisation of the two paradigms of data and money and when examining the design intentions of the protocol it’s clear to see it very much seeks to improve the relationship between the two. The same cannot necessarily be said for all other blockchain systems out there. 

If one wishes to promote a new paradigm of interoperability between data and money, what good is a blockchain if transaction fees are over $100 per kb data?

In 2024, the BSV Blockchain R&D team announced groundbreaking features for their upcoming architecture upgrade, Teranode that will significantly boost network efficiency and speed, pushing BSV’s capabilities from 5,000 transactions to 1 million transactions per second.

Teranode solves vertical scaling challenges on the BSV network by serving high-volume transaction nodes for enterprise and government use. Whether contracting with nodes or running their own, these clients drive the Teranode initiative.

Protocol custodian BSV Blockchain revealed a more service-oriented approach to the network’s work. The new features include ‘modularized’ functions such as transaction and block validation, plus block assembly into services that run only when required.

Teranode is soon to begin extended and sustained testing on a Proof of Concept implementation this month, with a full node release later in 2024. This is a significant upgrade for the BSV node software, and it is a ground-up rewrite of the BSV Blockchain architecture, designed to scale horizontally and provide new microservices for developers, applications, and users.

Similarly, how can a blockchain-based Web 3.0 transform the world if it can only process 15 transactions per second? 

You may hear DeFi (Decentralised Finance) evangelists speak of layer one or two scaling solutions to address these issues, but this does not mean these solutions are efficient. In fact, usually they do nothing more than kick the can down the road onto separate networks with none of them individually able to handle significant transactional throughput while keeping fees consistently low.  

Layer one or layer two solutions can therefore be said to be solutions in the same sense that a Rube Goldberg machine is a solution to cracking an egg in a fry pan. It doesn’t mean implementing one of these contraptions to crack eggs in every McDonalds around the world would add any value to their egg McMuffin processes whatsoever. 

If we examine what would be useful in this fusion of data and money, then increasing the granularity by which value can be associated with data and exchanged would be a very significant innovation. 

Being able to value data down to the fractions of a cent and scaling to thousands of transactions per second could pave the way for entirely new business models that would revolutionise digital society in ways we can only begin to imagine.  

Next steps for BSV blockchain-based Web 3.0

The realisation of the dream of Web 3.0 might seem far off, yet the BSV blockchain and affiliates are laying the groundwork for a robust and sustainable outcome.

Standardised protocols for Web 3.0

Web 3.0’s potential will be impossible to realise if the packets of a monetised data transaction depend on a Rube Goldberg contraption to bridge blockchain protocols, all with their own idiosyncrasies and complexities. The enemy of security and performance is complexity, after all.  

To steel BSV from such a scenario, the BSV Technical Standards Committee (TSC) is working on enhancing interoperability through standardisation. By facilitating industry participation in the development of global standards and ensuring technical standards are maintained and freely available, the TSC is ensuring BSV’s competitiveness as an infrastructure layer for Web 3.0.

IPv6 research forum

The BSV blockchain was engineered from the get-go to integrate with IPv6, allowing true peer-to-peer connectivity for payments and data transmission all at an infinitesimal cost per byte. 

With BSV – the only system capable of processing millions of data transactions per second for sub cent fees – it will be the only technological substrate to allow any kind of meaningful value to be offered by this Web 3.0 paradigm. 

Apart from this committee’s work, the BSV Academy and nChain are currently involved in research via an IPv6 forum in Malaysia exploring multiple angles. 

A big focus is on using the public private key pairs of ECDSA as the mechanism for Cryptographically Generated Addresses (CGA) in IPv6. This means that the later part of an IPv6 address will be derived from your Bitcoin public keys which will allow private and secure end-to-end channels to be set up for payment and communication. 

Some are still under the impression that CGA is not an efficient option to explore for IPv6 as they are using 2048bit keys from RSA and relying upon an entropy source in their implementation which makes the generation of these addresses far too slow to have practical applications. With the 256bit key lengths of ECDSA you get comparable security with a significant gain in performance making it relevant for production.

This is the gateway topic that, once unlocked, can lead to a whole host of other IPv6 synergies as you can leverage the native payment abilities of bitcoin to allow for optimising route finding, end-to-end jumbo packets of 4.3GB, and much more.

The Malaysian team is primarily focused on the security aspect of IPv6, while nChain is researching the challenges and pain points in IPv6 and how the Bitcoin protocol could provide meaningful solutions to any of those. 

Following on that, the team will explore focus case studies such as IPv6/Bitcoin email/paymail servers, or video conferencing/packet streaming via secure payment channels.