We measure the Edge Network community now in the hundreds of thousands – evidenced by the followers and members in channels such as Twitter and Discord, plus those who have signed up via edge.network for our email updates.
Many of you will be experts in crypto. Holders for some time of various currencies and active in support of the development of the technology in multiple ways. Others will be relative newcomers – earlier in the journey to understand the digital revolution happening right now, fuelled by the technology of Web3.
At Edge Network we work hard to make sure everyone understands our mission – and that of the technology that supports our work. It’s why episodes of Conversations on the Edge frequently take time to revisit subjects we’ve already covered. The success of Edge Network and projects like it depends on mainstream adoption and, by extension, those already informed helping those who do not yet understand.
So this week we turn to Web3 – what we may wish to understand as the third chapter of the Internet. Web 1.0 was largely static pages. Web 2.0 arrived to bring platforms and user-generated content such as social media, blogs and other services. Web3 is a fascinating opportunity because we are living in the early stages of its history – it remains an emerging technology with all of the potential that it brings.
In short, Web3 is the decentralised web. It is the idea that the Internet is trapped in the hands of Big Tech – of large organisations that centralise control and benefit disproportionately from the value it creates.
Web3 uses technology such as blockchain to decentralise this control – DeFi or Decentralised Finance facilitates transactions between individuals without bank or government involvement, while DAO or Decentralised Autonomous Organisations are open platforms controlled by transparent rules rather than a central committee.
Edge Network is just one of the technologies of Web3. It is setting up its own DAO, allowing the project to be run by the community that supports it. It aims to share the digital or cloud infrastructure currently dominated by Amazon, Google and Microsoft with everyone. Instead of relying on dedicated, centralised servers to host our data Edge will lace together the millions of machines owned by us all to create a shared infrastructure. That means we all offer up spare capacity and we all get paid for doing so, instead of lining the pockets of the few.
You can think of Edge as the infrastructure of Web3. It’s a decentralised cloud powered by blockchain technology. As the world moves to Web3, Edge Network has the first-mover advantage to be ready to support the digital projects that migrate. And the best bit is that all those who have signed up to support the project, all those who have bought and staked $EDGE tokens, all those who are earning revenue from their personal devices… are first movers too.
Knowledge
Last Updated:
January 2022