The gamechanger that even India's richest man Mukesh Ambani swears by

The advent of the Internet saw Web 1.0 that was about websites and blogs and gave rise to Yahoo and Amazon. Web 2.0 tried to connect the world and has been heavily influenced by digital innovations like Social, Mobile and Cloud making it popular and broadening the user base and usage. The Social revolution, brought on by Friendster, Myspace and then Facebook in 2004 made people open up and connect with each other; platforms like Airbnb allowed people to trust strangers and open up their homes, while Cloud helped enterprises to shift from investing in infrastructure to renting and pay per usage models for compute, storage and network.

Though we feel that the Web 2.0 is here to stay, we are already experiencing Web 3.0 but many people don’t know about it yet as it has not integrated into our lives. The emergence of the next wave called Web 3.0 (originally coined the Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s original inventor) we believe is going to change the way we work and operate.

The reliance on Web 2.0 saw multiple data leaks and service interruptions like the famous October 2016 distributed denial of service attack that seriously interrupted major online services including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Reddit, and the New York Times have resulted in technology giants like Facebook, Google to re-think their data strategy and data policies while paving way to emergence for the need of a reliable, decentralised internet built on blockchain technology.


In India, blockchain experiments have not taken off in the financial sector, unlike other countries. However, with CBDC trials launching this year, we are likely to see a lot of momentum in financial use cases of blockchain --- Tanvi Ratna, founder & CEO, Policy 4.0

Web 3.0 is going to make information technology leap forward to become an open, trustless and permissionless network. The outcome will open up the possibilities to coordinate, collaborate and incentivise multiple stakeholders e.g. different service providers, data generators and content writers etc giving them the power of ownership and build a balance in the system. It is going to open up possibilities of multi-reality experiences by connecting service providers and consumers across different domains like finance, gaming, entertainment, healthcare etc. The Web 3.0 is going to ride on tech innovations around Blockchain technology to ensure security and trust and with the infusion of Artificial Intelligence, NLP and Machine Learning, user experience and interaction are expected to improve.

In this regard, India’s government and the public sector is also making strides towards laying the foundational infrastructure and exploring use cases and carrying out multiple pilots leveraging Blockchain technology which have been outlined in its recent national blockchain paper.

Some examples are pilots for uses cases such as digitisation of land records and land registration (The initiatives from the Andhra Pradesh government in this direction is well noted) another example is the efforts of Niti Ayog in this direction e.g. GNFC direct benefit transfer (Niti Aayog pilot) and in addition, the state of Assam is seeking to leverage blockchain to build DApps for internal government functions as well as citizen-facing applications. The government is gearing towards building the National Blockchain Framework and has a vision to promote entrepreneurial development and involve premier research institutions, and is looking at collaborating to build the Blockchain technology stack by involving various stakeholders from Government, premier research institutes, technology platforms, start-ups and industry.

The backing from initial days by the public sector of envisioning a digital future for India has propelled Indian start-ups towards blockchain technology resulting in India being ranked number #2 in crypto adoption, much ahead of countries like the US and UK. We are one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrency markets globally, with an estimated fifteen to twenty million crypto investors in the country and total cryptocurrency holdings of $5.4bn. resulting in cryptocurrency as a popular modern-day asset class.

It is interesting to see the Web3.0 community in India growing at a rapid pace. This influx of interest from developers and VCs has resulted in building multiple solutions and products that make sense to masses. In this regards start-ups to watch out for and have caught mainstream attention are Polygon (previously Matic), EPNS (Ethereum Push Notification Service), InstaDApp and DeFi 11, as well as crypto exchanges like CoinSwitch Kuber(latest entry to unicorn club) ,CoinDCX, WazirX, ZebPay are leading the movement in India.

Some decentralised applications like Huddle01 have developed a decentralised video framework that has sought to reduce latency and connectivity in video conferences. The solution leverages edge computing by leveraging a decentralised network of devices and offering pretty much all the options that a Zoom, MS teams or google meet has to offer.

Another platform that leverages blockchain and serves enterprises ready to embrace Web3 is KoineArth. It has collaborated with MG motors and apart from enabling distribution of data via express consent of a user to initiate insurance claims, it has also helped MG motors introduce NFT in India.

So, the day is not very far when we start working with Web 3.0 that will go far beyond the initial use cases of cryptocurrencies and public sector governance. We will be able to use Web 3.0 based tools and applications and integrate them into our daily life just like we did with Web 2.0. The future will give the power of data distribution back in the hands of the individual such that he/she can decide who they want to share their information with. The most important aspect of Web 3.0 is decentralisation and the need of minimised trust required for information sharing making it easy to carry out trade, value transactions, share information with counterparties and be assured without any intermediary that the data is secure. This paradigm shift is going to give rise to new business innovations and business models; from global co-operatives to decentralised autonomous organisations and self-sovereign data marketplaces.

India with its large pool of tech talent, govt. backing and businesses working towards creating use cases, a healthy venture capital and start-up ecosystem and a very large base of digital savvy consumers is well positioned to lead Web 3.0 and Blockchain.

It is a matter of time before we see companies from India emerge in this space which are going to disrupt the existing Big Tech which have been built on the web 2.0 paradigm and central brokers of data and transactions.

(The author is Partner and Joint Leader, India Emerging Technologies, PwC)