At the beginning of this new year, it’s near impossible to go online without seeing some mention of Web3, mentions well-distributed across the positive-negative spectrum. All this talk begs the question: What exactly is Web3, and why is there so much buzz about it?

A successor of Web 1.0 (1991-2004) and Web 2.0 (2004-present), the term itself first found footing in 2014, when Ethereum founder Gavin Wood dubbed it a “decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain” (a digital ledger in which data is stored in “blocks” of information, including previous blocks’ hash