Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic and Cultural Frontier

User ownership of digital assets is the future of the internet, according to this thought-provoking treatise. Tapscott (coauthor of Blockchain Revolution), a managing director at the Ninepoint Partners investment firm, explores the possibilities presented by Web3, a proposed vision for how the internet might evolve to become decentralized and grant users greater control over their data. According to Tapscott, tokens, or “digital assets,” are the heart of this new system because they can be programmed to serve a variety of purposes (tokens representing a digital dollar, he notes, can be designed to break down into smaller units, but tokens can also be designed to remain indivisible for, say, recording a vote in an election). Web3 offers new economic opportunities, Tapscott argues, discussing how non-fungible tokens, aka NFTs—“unique digital goods” that can be bought, sold, and owned—allow artists to earn royalties on resales. The author highlights companies at the forefront of Web3, such as Decentraland, “a decentralized 3D reality platform collectively owned by its users.” Tapscott excels at drawing out the wide-ranging potential of the burgeoning technology, and the straightforward explanations of how it works will be appreciated by those who don’t know bitcoin from blockchains (the latter of which, he explains, are “distributed ledgers of transactions that everyone can see but no single party can alter”). This will ignite readers’ curiosity. (Sept.)