Travolution Summit 2023: 'Enormous' disruption of the Web 3.0 era is upon us

Headline speaker Graham Cooke said all industries are facing a revolution as Non-Fungible Tokens and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations redefine how humans create and exchange value

The world is on the cusp of a technological Web 3.0 revolution and every business sector will face supply-side disruption as how humans create and share value is redefined.

That was the prediction from Graham Cooke, the headline speaker at the 2023 Travolution European Summit whose book Web3: The End of Business-As-Usual hit the bookshelves last November.

Cooke, who formerly worked for Google in ecommerce and went on to found his own agency Qubit, described to delegates how the progress of technology goes through eras.

He said the original World Wide Web was built in the Web 1.0 era based on protocols like HTML which Cooke said acted like shipping containers, allowing world-wide sharing and commerce.

The Web 2.0 era was one of applications and saw the likes of Google, Amazon and Expedia became established, while Web 3.0 is another protocol era when Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have emerged.

Cooke said Web 3.0 is the prelude to Web 4.0 when new applications will emerge that will be mass adopted and will disrupt established ways of creating and trading value.

“What we are finding is that the stage we are in now is really like that early HTML stage where we are just crossing the border of what it was like for HTML to emerge on to Web 1.0,” he said.

Cooke pointed to the emergence of Bitcoin which, although controversial, has redefined how a currency can be created, valued and traded using a computer algorithm and a network.

This is challenging a 6,000-year-old protocol for currencies based on the gold standard, something that most countries have been moving away from.

All emerging technology experiences a “calamity”, Cooke added, with Web 1.0 ending in the first dot com crash, and Web 3.0 seeing last year’s collapse of crypto trading platform SPF.

“Web 3.0’s issues has been that a lot of this value-based internet has ended up in highly speculative crazes. SPF was just using a Web 2.0 model to make you think you’re buying into Web 3.0.

“We’ve cleared this out now and are in a really good spot for using the technologies that Web 3.0 brings.”

Cooke said all technological eras require a catalyst to drive them up the steep part of the adoption S-curve. Web 1.0’s was HTML, Web 2.0 was the smartphone, and Web 3.0’s will be NFTs, he said.

“We are definitely now about to go to steep part of Web 3.0. I think the catalyst HTML equivalent is going to be NFTs – they are effectively a web page for information in Web 3.0 era.

“Saying ‘that’s an NFT business’ is like saying ‘that’s a web page business’ and trying to argue that Expedia and Amazon and Google are all the same because they are just web pages.

“This is the next generation Web 3.0 web page. Attached to NFTs is the concept of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (Dao), which potentially are going to become one of your biggest competitors.”

Cooke added: “Every industry is going to experience some sort of enormous disruption on the supply side, in the way people come together and create something.

“A Dao and NFT and token-based economy will emerge to allow people to create value and exchange value.”