World Wide Web inventor criticizes "Web3": Blockchain is not the solution

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, recently criticized the concept of "Web3," stating that he does not consider Web3 to be a true network system and does not believe that blockchain technology is the solution for the next generation of the Internet.

Web3 is Not the Web

According to a report by CNBC here, Tim Berners-Lee spoke at the "Web Summit 2022" in Lisbon, where he urged people not to just know Web3 as a buzzword, but to understand its true meaning. He first criticized the concept of Web3 based on blockchain:

The term Web3 has been hijacked by the Ethereum blockchain crowd, which is really a shameful thing. In fact, Web3 is not really a kind of internet at all.

In the records of the World Wide Web Foundation here, Berners-Lee had already put forward some key concepts for "Web 3.0" in the 1990s, such as open source and decentralization, and later defined it again in 2006.

In his project "Solid" here, Berners-Lee used the term Web 3.0 and emphasized the difference from Web3, but the public often confuses the two. He stated at the summit:

Blockchain may be helpful for some things, but it is completely useless for Solid. Blockchain is too slow, too expensive, and too transparent. Private data storage should be very efficient, cheap, and private. There is no need to pay attention to things built randomly on the blockchain. We have not applied blockchain technology to Solid.

In fact, Berners-Lee expressed the same view at the TNW Summit in June here this year, believing that it is not feasible to achieve efficiency, scalability, and privacy simultaneously through blockchain technology.

However, in June of last year, Berners-Lee auctioned an NFT at Sotheby's, consisting of the original code of the World Wide Web that he created between 1990 and 1991, which eventually sold for $5.4345 million.

At that time, he said:

NFTs, whether they are artworks or digital artifacts like this, are the latest interesting creations in the field and the most appropriate way of ownership. They are the ideal way to package the origins of the internet behind the scenes.