From Web1 to Web4: Every Era of the Internet, Explained

From Web1 to Web4, discover how the internet evolved from static web pages to the intelligent, decentralized web. Explore every era explained, simply.

“Web 2.0” and “Web3” are terms that get thrown around a lot, but rarely explored in detail, or questioned as to why the next iteration keeps getting proposed before the previous finishes its adoption curve. Let’s take a closer look at each iteration and what gets changed.

Web 1.0 - The Read-Only Web (1991–2004)

Think of the early days of the web as a giant public bulletin board.

You couldn’t post comments, and the only interaction was clicking from page to page, which were mostly static HTML pages written and maintained by a small group of HTML hackers - there was no content creation for the general masses, only consumption. There were no accounts and no commenting - just reading and leaving.

The tech underpinning it was simple: a little HTML, some HTTP, dial-up modems, GeoCities-type hosting, and AltaVista-type search engines that tried to make sense of it all. 

Everything was flat files, no databases, because databases were complex and expensive things run by large companies like Oracle.

Web 2.0 - The Read-Write Web (2004–Present)

Web 2.0 is the era we currently live in - the world of user-generated content, social media, and the broader participatory web, where everyone has a platform and the public increasingly blurs into the private sphere, rewriting the rules of engagement and economics around content.

This era was enabled by technologies like AJAX and APIs (that let web apps talk to each other), cloud databases (that made storing all this user data tractable), and mobile apps (which ported these technologies onto always-available, high-bandwidth devices).

Still, Web3 thinkers felt that even this wasn’t enough - since in many ways, the big tech platforms still acted as “the owner” of all the content, user-data, and connections that happen on their sites, with their own rules, and with very limited portability or choice - your Facebook posts are Facebook’s, YouTube videos are YouTube’s property, etc.

Web3 - the Read-Write-Own Web (2014–Present)

Web3 promised to change this ownership dynamic - by leveraging new cryptographic technologies, primarily blockchains - decentralized databases - so that, instead of owning data on a company-controlled server, one owns it on a shared public database.

This broad vision encompasses a number of specific innovations:

• Blockchains themselves (Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, etc.) as decentralized “databases”

• Smart contracts - self-executing code on top of those blockchain layers;

• Wallets, as cryptographic identities, that hold assets and interact with smart contracts;

• Tokens, NFTs, and related standards, which provide a notion of digital ownership;

• DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), which are a type of smart contract that governs itself via rules encoded in software, typically with community voting.

The promise of Web3 is that your digital “ownership” of things on the internet is genuinely portable and not hostage to any one company, as well as being more “expressive” (NFTs let you prove that something is rare, etc.).

The early reality of Web3 was messy - wallets were hard to set up, gas fees were prohibitively expensive, and a single mistake could make you “lose your coins” forever. 

But the last couple of years have seen dramatic improvements, which is why it makes sense to think of us on the cusp of a new era: embedded wallets (no app needed), account abstraction (easier recovery, etc.), and passkeys (replacing seeds) are now becoming commonplace, which is why saying that “Web3 is too hard” is a less compelling argument than it was 5 years ago.

Web4 - the Read-Write-Own-Act Web (2026–?)

But what comes next? This is where things get exciting, because it’s no longer science-fiction - it’s actively happening: this year, early adopters have started to build the first elements of what one could call Web4 - the participatory (read-write-act) web. 

In effect: autonomous agents on the web, capable of independent action (or choices, as one might say), with some of the same implications as one might imagine from an artificial general intelligence, but limited to a narrower set of “tasks” as defined by the particular agent.

The technologies powering this next era are interesting - and in many cases, also quite practical and mundane. These include:

• Agents with wallets: autonomous agents capable of making financial transactions or decisions (e.g. self-driving cars making toll payments on the road);

• Agents that can browse and transact: similar to the first category, but with an expanded set of capabilities such as booking flights, comparing prices, buying goods, and reporting expenses;

• Machine identity: in tandem with this push for greater autonomy, there is also a need for machine-machine authentication, particularly when it comes to making sure that a particular autonomous agent is legitimate (i.e. not fake).

This third area in particular is driving the current push towards standardized decentralized identity solutions for non-human agents.

Another major theme powering Web4 is spatial and physical integration: connecting the physical world into this system of autonomous agents, whether it’s the “digital twin” of a factory sensor or a home thermostat. 

The current ecosystem is seeing many of these ideas take form - the EU’s metaverse initiatives and blockchain-based digital twins are both early manifestations of “Web4,” if one wants to label them as such. 

Other ideas, such as brain-computer interfaces, a “neural bill of rights,” and a “singularity” in the 2040s, are significantly more speculative, built on top of a conflation of several layers of existing technologies, without necessarily being grounded in actual near-term developments - conflating the “metaverse” hype with the actual development of serious brain-computer interfaces, for instance, would be a mistake. 

At the same time, there are real-world developments underway, including the aforementioned embedded wallets and self-driving cars - and the next phase of evolution of the web may not be as distant as one thinks.

The common thread between all of these themes is that they concern shifting patterns of labor and ownership: Web1 ushered in an era where information became accessible to all, while Web2 created an environment where everyone could create, albeit with the fruits of their labor (and data) largely funneled into the hands of a few big tech giants. 

Web3 sought to rebalance this dynamic by decentralizing ownership back to the users, and Web4 - if the early signs are any indication - would seek to do the same for labor: if Web3 is about “ownership,” then Web4 is about “advisory,” or “outsourcing.”

One might argue that the next major question to ask is not “what comes after Web3/Web4?” but rather “who gets to control it?”