Lessons from Web2 Commercial History
The 50-year development of the Internet is a journey of "making search simpler and easier to use."
Every time you click on a web browser to search, you can always find the information you want, but do you know what happens behind this? You might think that by using a networked device (mobile phone, computer) to operate a browser (Firefox, Chrome), you send an information request to a server, and then the server calls the information back to your device, nothing more...
In fact, the story behind this is far more complex. And making all this commercialized starts with Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web.
1. The Beginning of Internet Commerce, The World Wide Web
When you gently click on your browser, a signal is sent from your device, but what else does it experience?
According to how the network works, when a user makes a request, this process requires at least the Internet, Internet interfaces, TCP/IP information transmission protocol, DNS domain name service system, HTTP hypertext transfer protocol, and files composed of code and resources.
This process is like your online shopping process on an e-commerce website. You need to use a networked device to find a specific category of products on the e-commerce website, then enter the variety and quantity, enter the address and payment, after which the merchant ships the goods, and the delivery person follows your home address to deliver these goods to your hands.
It seems like a smooth operation, but the process is long and arduous.
If we count from the ARPANET born in 1969, early network developers spent more than 20 years laying the technical foundation until the Pandora's box of the Internet was truly opened—the invention of the "World Wide Web."
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist and professor at the University of Southampton and MIT, invented the World Wide Web, and in 1990 wrote the first web browser while working at CERN in Switzerland. On December 25, 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau successfully achieved the first communication between an HTTP proxy and server through the Internet.
This combination not only laid the technical foundation for large-scale commercial applications of the Internet but also laid the commercial foundation for the Internet explosion from 1990 to 2000. For the next 30 years, the biggest business on the Internet remained "search," from Google to Amazon, from Baidu to Alibaba, nothing less.
The Web1 phase we are familiar with was born here. The birth and commercialization wave of the World Wide Web (WWW) spawned applications such as browsers, portal websites, and e-commerce; the Web2 of the Internet that we are currently experiencing also takes root here, from blogs and social media to the rise of 4G networks and mobile devices...
Looking back on the development of the blockchain industry over the past decade, Bitcoin , born in 2009, is the first crypto asset in the true sense, becoming the real digital gold in cyberspace, and also opening up new territories for blockchain technology. Ethereum in 2013 enabled decentralized applications based on smart contracts to flourish everywhere, making crypto assets programmable and becoming the foundation for the industry's explosion.
If Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web and the first web browser written a year later were the beginning of the Internet commercial wave, then Ethereum in 2013 is the true beginning of the decentralized world's Big Bang.
In fact, the public chains represented by Ethereum, their blockchain underlying architecture (data layer , network layer , consensus layer, incentive layer, contract layer, application layer) and applications correspond in a sense to the World Wide Web and the underlying protocols that support the Internet (Internet interfaces, TCP/IP information transmission protocol, DNS domain name service system, HTTP hypertext transfer protocol, files composed of code and resources), including Dfinity, Solana, Avalanche, Cosmos, Polkadot, Terra, Polygon, Near, Fantom, Flow , Harmony public chains, nothing less.
At least we also see that Ethereum ecosystem application ENS and Terra ecosystem application TNS correspond to the Internet's DNS, while Dfinity directly copied every aspect of the Internet at the ecosystem level.
The blockchain world has also expanded exploration from finance and culture, from the 2020 DeFi explosion to the 2021 NFT breakout. These explorations and innovations based on decentralization have given new life to the crypto world.
2. The Beginning of Blockchain Commerce, DeFi and NFT
If the beginning of Internet commercialization was the invention of the "World Wide Web" and the birth of browsers, then the beginning of blockchain commercialization is DeFi and NFT.
In May 2020, DeFi lending leader Compound used innovative "lending is mining" to increase its funds deposited by 10 times within a month, with COMP valuation high, kicking off the prologue of the DeFi carnival. After this, new DeFi concepts emerged endlessly, lending platforms, decentralized exchanges, decentralized autonomous organizations, stablecoins , oracles continued to emerge, and excellent DeFi projects one after another used token liquidity mining to achieve user cold start. The total market capitalization of the top 100 DeFi projects rose from tens of billions of dollars to a high of $120 billion in the second half of 2021.
On March 11, 2021, digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold his NFT digital artwork "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" at Christie's for $69 million. After this, stars and artists from all walks of life such as Zion Lateef Williamson, Takashi Murakami, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Twitter CEO, Edward Joseph Snowden, Paris Hilton, and Yao Ming successively released NFTs through various NFT platforms, pushing NFTs into the public eye.
According to Google Trends, global search volume for the keywords "NFT" and "Non-Fungible Token" surged in 2021, and attention to the NFT ecosystem continued to climb, completely breaking out of the circle.
DeFi and NFT, the former is the financialization path of the blockchain world, the latter is the cultural development path of the blockchain world. If the beginning of blockchain commercialization is DeFi and NFT, then what opened the Pandora's box of both was Compound's lending is mining for the former, and Beeple's art exhibition's sky-high auction for the latter.
In addition, just as any field will receive huge amounts of financing before it explodes, for example, in 1999 when the Internet exploded on a large scale, there were 457 initial public offerings, more than once a day, similarly, accompanying the explosion of DeFi and NFT, there were also financing events in these two areas.
According to data from the 2021 Global Blockchain Investment and Financing Report, in 2021, there were 1,812 financing events in the global blockchain industry, of which 1,433 disclosed specific total financing amounts, totaling $48.674 billion, with an average single financing amount of $33.9665 million. Among all financing events, 35% occurred in the DeFi and NFT fields, exceeding one-third of the total financing events.
What directions will the future crypto blockchain industry advance toward? As the data scale of the blockchain world continues to increase and content based on decentralized architecture increases, the search field may be the next windfall.
Reviewing the major turning points in the commercial history of the Web2 world, its practical significance is to let us, who are in the digitalization process, see the stage of the entire industry. This positioning may be vague, but at least the direction is correct.
Disclaimer
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