Web3 After 16 Years: Why Hasn't It Replaced Web2 Yet?— A Personal Reflection on the State of the Decentralized Web
From the time McCulloch and Pitts proposed the first artificial neuron model in 1943, artificial intelligence has undergone 82 years of development. During this journey, it has experienced two notable “AI winters.”The first winter was primarily due to severe limitations in computing power and performance bottlenecks in early symbolic reasoning models. The second stemmed from the high maintenance costs of expert systems, their lack of generalization ability, and extreme fragility when applied to new or open-ended scenarios.
Even today, beneath the surface of rapid progress and hype, large language models still face fundamental challenges: exorbitant training costs, heavy reliance on GPU resources for inference, monopoly by high-performance computing platforms, and business models that have yet to form a sustainable profit loop.In addition, persistent issues such as hallucination, safety vulnerabilities, ethical dilemmas, and underdeveloped regulatory frameworks remain significant obstacles to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). Take OpenAI as an example: although its revenue soared after 2023, surpassing one billion USD annually, it remains unprofitable due to massive training and operational costs. Meanwhile, the recently popular DeepSeek has demonstrated impressive performance in Chinese language tasks and mathematical reasoning with a significantly lower training cost, but still lags behind the GPT series in terms of multimodal capabilities, integrated search, dialogue coherence, and overall user experience.
It’s clear that without reducing costs while maintaining performance and achieving financial sustainability, the development of large-scale models cannot support long-term ecosystem building. The "ceiling" of current AI technology will become increasingly apparent.
The evolution of the Web has likewise been a long journey of technological accumulation and infrastructure buildup. From the proposal of TCP/IP protocols in the 1970s to Tim Berners-Lee’s release of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1991, the foundational infrastructure of Web1 gradually took shape, ushering in the first phase of the Internet era.
The rise of Web1 was enabled by several key components: the development of transmission infrastructure (optical fibers, cables, modems), the proliferation of end-user devices (especially the home PC), the construction of backend systems like servers and DNS, and the global standardization of communication via the TCP/IP protocol. Between 1993 and 2000, Web1 gradually became a global platform for information dissemination. However, it had obvious limitations: static content, no interactivity, passive users, and weak monetization models. The emergence of Web2 addressed these shortcomings by introducing mobile devices (especially smartphones) and app stores, which significantly lowered the barrier to user participation.Social media, UGC platforms, and algorithmic recommendation systems fueled a new era in which everyone could create, share, and interact. Yet, Web2 is far from perfect. It brought deep-rooted issues such as frequent data privacy violations, centralized platforms monopolizing data and discourse power, the spread of misinformation and scams, and structural tensions between freedom of expression and platform censorship.
Web3 emerges as a transformative response to these issues. In 2014, Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood explicitly introduced the concept of Web3 in his article Why We Need Web3.0, defining it as a trustless, permissionless, and decentralized version of the Internet, built on blockchain and driven by token-based economies.Web3 aims to address Web2’s structural flaws by enabling:
user-controlled data sovereignty,
decentralized identity (DID),
native on-chain value transfer and creator ownership,
and censorship-resistant, anti-monopoly protocol networks.
Although it has been 16 years since Satoshi Nakamoto proposed Bitcoin in 2008, Web3 remains in its early stage—facing many challenges similar to those seen in the early days of AI and the Web. These include:
underdeveloped infrastructure (complex on-chain interactions, difficult wallet and key management, high gas fees, limited scalability),
lack of “killer applications” (ordinary users lack strong motivation to migrate),
legal and regulatory uncertainty (strong financial implications, cross-border nature, undefined compliance paths),
and persistent security concerns (rug pulls, hacks, smart contract vulnerabilities).
Yet, as history shows, technological revolutions are rarely immediate—they require patience, iteration, and compounding maturity.We are already witnessing notable breakthroughs in performance and cost-efficiency through technologies like Solana, Layer 2 solutions, and Rollups.As we previously discussed, the emerging convergence of AI and Web3 is unlocking new paths for intelligent interactions and autonomous systems on-chain.
Just like the early days of Web1, Web3 is quietly laying down the foundational infrastructure for something far greater.It only needs time—“let the bullet fly a little longer.”Once the on-chain experience can match or exceed that of centralized platforms, Web3 will inevitably explode in value and reconfigure the digital landscape in ways we’ve only begun to imagine.
At the same time, new technologies will necessitate new governance mechanisms.The construction of robust legal and institutional frameworks will be essential in safeguarding and guiding Web3's long-term development.
Therefore, I firmly believe that despite still being in its early exploratory phase, the value philosophy and technical potential embodied in Web3 will ultimately lead us into a more autonomous, open, and trustworthy digital era. Just as Web1 and Web2 once quietly reshaped the world, we are now witnessing the dawn of the next paradigm shift.
It may not arrive overnight, but it will arrive.
And when it does—it will be a world where data truly belongs to users, creativity belongs to its creators, and trust is no longer outsourced to centralized gatekeepers.
The future undoubtedly belongs to Web3.
——Tangleaphne