Building a Decentralized Web With Web5

Hello, everyone. Welcome to JS Nation. It's my pleasure to be giving this talk today, a lightning talk about building a decentralized web with Web5.

My name is Adewale Abati, and I'm a web engineer and developer advocate, currently working as a staff developer advocate for TBD, which is essentially a company that is looking to build a decentralized future. Today, I'm going to be talking about building a decentralized web. And to do that, the first question is, what is the web like today? Right?

The web is powerful and it's accessible, and I love it for that, but it also has its own shortcomings. One of my favorite things about the web is the fact that I can access it on almost any device, my PlayStation, smart watches, smart TVs, as the case may be. But at the same time, a lot of the data on the web is owned and centralized by corporate bodies, where users and everyday users do not have access or control over their own data. But if you look at the web and the progression over the years, it was initially designed to be decentralized, where people come in, share information, link pages to each other, and the web gets connected.

So introducing Web 5 today, I get a lot of jokes about people asking, why is it not called Web 4? What's Web 5 all about? Right? And Web 5 is essentially trying to take the best of Web 2, which is the current web that we experience today, that we view today, and also the ideology and the best parts of Web 3, which is the decentralization and users being in control of their own data and most of the essentials of the web. So what this means is that Web 5 is a decentralized platform that allows users to own their own data and identity and be able to reuse this information across multiple platforms. There was recently a story of what's it called? A Twitter user went to that site to change to X, where they just obtained their username right, and they had no control over that, because it was never their own identity to begin with. But today we log into multiple websites, multiple platforms using some of the social logins. And this is what Web 5 is looking to improve on when it comes to the web in general.

So there are three pillars of Web 5, and these are all technologies that are built by different standard bodies. And I'm going to be going through each one of them to introduce you to the technology, so I can interest you enough to go learn more about them, because this is just a lightning talk, right? The first one is decentralized identifiers, and they are all self-owned. Decentralized identifiers are self-owned entities that allows you to be able to control your own identity. If you think about every other means of identity on the web today, they are owned by different other bodies like email, social handles, and they cannot be taken from us at any point in time. They are W3C standard, meaning anyone can build and contribute to this standard and start working on it, start using it in everyday life, right?

And the string, a deed is essentially a string that you can be identified with, which is kind of like your name. And using this, you can go to different platforms, using different technologies to identify yourself on the Internet. An example of a deed is this on my screen right now, which is a deed example and a bunch of string, which is three important segments of it. The first identifies as a deed, and the second one is just trying to define what method. The same way we have TLDs, like domainnames.com.net, they kind of specify what kind of deed this is. A deed also resolves like a TLD, meaning it points out this name, this string that identifies somebody, this is the location of the document that you can use to find out more information about them that they've chosen to share.

The next thing, which is also one of my favorite parts about these pillars, is verifiable credentials. Today, it is very difficult to know what is true, correct, or authentic on the Internet. But with verifiable credentials, which are cryptographically signed digital documents, you are able to ensure trust and also verify claims that people make on the Internet. So, think about stuff like birth certificates, educational certificates, or just prove that your TLD or the claim you are making is actually valid. All of this can be digitally signed, cryptographically signed and verified and connected to deeds to make sure that this thing is also connected to the identity. And this can be used in different, different platforms.

I think LinkedIn as an example, uses verifiable credentials to issue certification on their platform and it is also connected to deeds. A simple example here is imagine Alice, a fictional character applying for a loan. And for Alice to be able to prove that she works at a specific place, to be able to grant this loan, an easy way to do this would be a company, ACME in this case, issuing a verifiable credential, which includes a name, a salary, and just some kind of validation that, yes, this is an employee of ours. And all of this can be sent across board or shared with the people that have been given the right permissions to verify that the claim that Alice is making is actually true. There are companies today that are also working on using verifiable credentials in different sections of the world, essentially. We have companies that are building digital travel documents, which essentially is a verifiable credential or works kind of like a passport, which this person is allowed to enter into this country or this person is a citizen of this country because it's essentially tied to their identity as well. And it kind of opens up a whole world of possibilities when you start to think more about what verifiable credentials are capable of being, right?

The third and final pillar of Web 5 is decentralized web nodes. And this particularly, you know, tackles the problem of data and who is in control of our data, right? Decentralized web nodes acts as data stores for decentralized web apps where the user themselves can host or, you know, manage their own data and they can reuse it across different devices as the case may be. The decentralized web nodes can also hold, you know, public and encrypted data so you can choose to share some part of, you know, your own personal data like your name or your age if you want to, in some cases, and other public information with people or even websites. And mentally when you think about how this could, you know, could work or improve your life in general, you could think about onboarding flows, right? If you go to a website, say, a design website like Figma, and you have to, you know, customize user preferences, you know, fill in your name, your email, stuff that you do like every other time and you go to a different website, if these are all decentralized web applications, it's easy to reuse your personal information that you've chosen to give them permission to across all of these websites. And that is what is possible when we as individuals are in control of our own data or at least having it accessible to us in a controlled form. So if you're working on a web application or even using a web application that is, you know, web 5 enabled or is decentralized by nature, it's easy for you to use across your different devices. We use your data on these platforms. For example, think about if you have a music playlist on Spotify and you want to change the provider to, say, Apple Music, you're able to go around with your own music data and go to a different platform because your data is yours or the experiences that these people create is something that you can choose to, you know, put around for, right? So these three things I've mentioned are essentially the pillars of web 5.

Web 5 in its own case is open source, is something that is a technology that is constantly being developed. There is a website that you can go to to find out more about web 5 in general and are we web 5 yet? I'm going to be sharing that on screen in a second. But these pillars as decentralized as they are, are also, you know, developed by open bodies, open standard bodies. For example, decentralized identifiers is, you know, managed by the W3C Foundation, same as verifiable credentials. And then this decentralized web nodes is something that is being managed by the Digital Identity Foundation, right? Which is the DIF.

So a bunch of questions I also get is what is the similarity between, you know, building a decentralized web app and a progressive web app? At the core of it, as taking outside, you know, identity or how identification is done in these applications, data storage is also a very key part of it. With progressive web apps you can still have, you know, data stored on the web or sometimes through your service worker, but with DWAs, the data is introduced as a form of, you know, being in control of the user and it can still work as a PWA, right? So you can still be PWAs that can either be or not be a decentralized web application. So that is kind of like the major similarities and differences, as case may be, between PWAs and DWAs.

Why am I excited about WebR and why I think it should be as well? Yeah, so data and identity is owned and can be transferred across board based on what the user has chosen to do. You can give permissions to any platform that you want and also take away permissions as the case may be, right? It also reduces incredibly the friction of onboarding on new platforms or services, with the example that I shared with, you know, trying to move from a different music platform to another one. If your data is yours, you can easily do this as easily as possible. And also building, you know, decentralized applications with WebR, for example, allows developers to focus more on user experiences and not worry, you know, about customer infrastructure or, you know, managing databases and servers and the likes, because all of this can be, you know, distributed and decentralized across the individuals and users themselves. So why would companies buy into this? Web5 is not called to convince giants, you know, just, oh, absolutely give away your data or lose control over it. But when we get to a point where people have the, what's it called, understanding that they can be in control of their own data and, you know, new companies or older companies, as case may be, start to adopt this technology, it starts becoming a given, it becomes a norm for users to be in control of their own data through platforms or through their own, you know, choices and be able to just go around and use a focus more on user experiences that could be beneficial and just make life easier, right? And also companies will buy into this because it helps develop the ecosystem. There's less costs to be spent on data servers and centers and the likes and all those things. They could also be, you know, more companies that provide opportunities and platforms to manage DWs, for example.

A couple of example applications that could be made possible with Web5 at the moment, because it's also a work in progress, the example I showed you, you know, Spotify and Google, which is Universal Music Playlist, Connected Travel, which is essentially you booking a flight, hotel, you know, taxi and the likes, and being able to share all this information easily, for example, with preferable credentials, that definitely, definitely improves the quality of life, right? And also health experiences. It's a common case where people, you know, have like a GP in Europe, like we call it general practitioner or a doctor of their medical files in this in a separate, you know, part of the world and they want to move somewhere else. And it becomes really complicated to, you know, transfer this information. If all of this, you know, are done through DWNs or VCs, as the case may be, it's easy to digitally transport and share this and also maintaining high quality, you know, health experience across locations. And finally, financial solutions. Web5 and what it brings provides an easy way to improve the current financial solutions of the world. An example is a project that we also work on called TBDex, well, that's by the way. It enables people to be able to transfer and just, you know, maintain anonymity when they want to, but also connect stuff to their deeds in a way that they can continue to stay in control of their own identity and financial control, as well. Everything isn't figured out yet. Web5 itself is a work in progress and when things are decentralized like this, it means more control is also going to the user, which has its own pros and cons, right? One of it is key management, means self-custody is really, really difficult and users also need to be enabled, you know, or figure out a way to properly manage their keys. Data usage as well, if users are in more control of their data, how do we prevent abuse? How do we make sure that organizations or platforms that are giving access to these data do not necessarily abuse it? But, yeah, building for Web5 personally for me has been very exciting. I'm learning something new almost every other week, but if you also have found any of these technologies interesting, that's decentralized identifier, verified liquidity and sharehouse, or decentralized web nodes, you can check out developer.tbd.website.docs, which talks about all of these technologies. You can check, you know, areweweb5yet.com, you can check w3c.com and just, you know, give a Google search, right? Because this is essential technologies that even if they are not used together as Web5, they are used individually, they, you know, provide an opportunity to change how we essentially build for the web. Thank you very much. And it's been an honor speaking here at GIS Nation. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you. Thank you.