Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, has unveiled Web5, a decentralised platform with a focus on securing personal data.
"We struggle to secure personal data with hundreds of accounts and passwords we can’t remember. On the web today, identity and personal data have become the property of third parties,” TBD, the bitcoin-focused subsidiary of his company, Block, says on its website.
"This will likely be our most important contribution to the internet. Proud of the team. RIP web3 VCs," he wrote in a Tweet. The project is still under development and does not have an official release date.
Dorsey's Problem with Web3
Web5 is built on the assertion that the current Web3, an iteration of the internet based on decentralisation – think cryptocurrency and NFTs – isn't much better than traditional internet.
Dorsey believes that Web3 today is an enrichment scheme for venture capitalists (VCs) – a view echoed by Dogecoin co-creator Jackson Palmer.
Palmer told Australian e-magazine Crikey that the digital asset industry is "almost purpose built" to extract wealth from uninformed investors by making them pump funds into assets they do not fully understand.
"In the current Web model, people are users who do not own their data or
identity. They are given accounts by companies and their data is held captive in app silos," TBD says.
Decentralised Identities
Web5 is intended to enable users to interact with one another without intermediaries without completely abandoning the traditional Web2, which still boasts the most utility.
The aim is to build a decentralised layer on top of the internet by changing the way user data is stored.
Rather than getting stored with third party apps and websites, identity data will be stored with users with the help of unique decentralised identities, allowing people to move from application to application without needing to explicitly log in and expose their identities.
Apart from identity, decentralised storage of data and preferences is also theoretically possible with Web5.
TBD explains with an example:
"Bob is a music lover and hates having his personal data locked to a single vendor. It forces him to regurgitate his playlists and songs over and over again across different music apps. Thankfully there's a way out of this maze of vendor-locked silos: Bob can keep this data in his decentralized web node. This way Bob is able to grant any music app access to his settings and preferences, enabling him to take his personalized music experience wherever he chooses."
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