Too soon to anticipate all the ramifications of the recent Ethereum blockchain merger, but it certainly addresses web3’s most frequent (and valid) criticism of excessive power consumption. Critics may still find a new reason to oppose ETH, but I hope this merger will lead to something else: a chance for us to combine the best of Web 2.0 with the most exciting of web3.

There seems to be a growing divide in Silicon Valley, with the traditional Web 2.0 industry and the emerging web3 ecosystem being portrayed as polar opposites. And somewhere in the middle, there were new startups.

I’m active in all three groups, and I believe much of this controversy is based on wild talk and hype from VCs and other non-developer evangelists. For example, the constant promotion of NFT drops by celebrities has contributed to the impression that the web3 as a whole is a Ponzi scheme. In fact, NFT is only a small part of the web3 ecosystem and not even the most interesting or potentially transformative in my opinion.

Although Web 2.0 and web3 may seem incompatible, I believe it is better to look at technologies like blockchain and ETH as potential back-end solutions to the scalability challenges that all companies face. Similarly, web3 proponents must recognize that the maturity of Web 2.0 makes it indispensable for many basic use cases.

Let’s look at a couple of examples where each side can contribute:

From web3: The New Revolution in Open Source

To capture what’s happening now in web3 development, we have to go back to the Web 2.0 era.

During the dot-com boom, there was quite a bit of buzz around open source, Linux, and popular companies like Red Hat. Although very few consumers would go ahead and install Linux as their operating system, the buzz helped contribute to something equally important. In the background, few noticed, Linux quickly became the popular operating system for running the servers of 96.5% of the millions of top web domains — not to mention the huge Android market.