The Fediverse Points to Our Social Media Future, Post-Musk

After the news broke that Elon Musk’s offer to acquire Twitter had been accepted, many Twitter users began to reignite their old Mastodon, Tumblr and other social media accounts. There was also talk amongst the Twitterati about resurrecting their blogs and putting their faith back into RSS (Really Simple Syndication). But for those of you … Read more

Web3 Tools and Tipping Points: A Chat with Infura Co-Founder

Infura is a blockchain development platform that is part of a suite of products owned by Consensys, a leading tool provider in the Web3 ecosystem. To use cloud computing terminology, Infura can be thought of as “blockchain-as-a-service,” because it abstracts away the difficulties of dealing with a blockchain network. By using Infura, or a competing … Read more

RapidAPI Partners with Formula 1 Team Scuderia AlphaTauri

RapidAPI, an API management company that became a Silicon Valley unicorn (worth over $1 billion) after its most recent venture capital round last month, has announced “a major multiyear partnership” with Formula 1 team Scuderia AlphaTauri. RapidAPI says the partnership will enable Scuderia AlphaTauri, whose current drivers are Pierre Gasly and Yuki Tsunoda, “to centralize … Read more

ERC-1155: An NFT Standard for Online Games and Gamified Apps

In my previous column about NFTs (non-fungible tokens), I discussed the current leading standard for this technology: ERC-721. That’s the one most digital collectibles use — everything from CryptoKitties to the Bored Ape Yacht Club. But I also mentioned an emerging standard, ERC-1155, which has become the go-to standard for NFTs within blockchain games. To … Read more

Ceramic’s Web3 Composability Resurrects Web 2.0 Mashups

Composability has become a new buzzword in the Web3 world. “An application is composable if it can be used as a building block for another application,” wrote a Web3 infrastructure company called Syndica. In another definition, a16z VC Chris Dixon defined composability as “the ability to mix and match software components like lego bricks.” If … Read more

The Shape of Things to Come: GraphQL and the Web of APIs

The API management industry is undergoing another transformation, with GraphQL increasingly seen as an emerging industry standard — not only for traditional Web 2.0 businesses, like Shopify, but also for new Web3 protocols like The Graph. While REST (Representational State Transfer) is still by far the leading format for offering APIs, some in the industry … Read more

Can NFT Technology Expand Beyond Digital Apes and Punks?

NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) have taken the internet world by storm over the past year or two. When we think of NFTs today, we mostly think of the digital cartoons that have saturated our social media screens — apes, punks and everything in-between. There have also been massive NFT art sales, epitomized by this era’s answer … Read more

RSS3 Brings Syndication Feeds (and FriendFeed) to Web3

One of the forgotten technologies of this era of the internet is RSS (Really Simple Syndication), an open syndication protocol that helped define the Web 2.0 era. From the early 2000s, RSS enabled anyone to publish their thoughts to the web, via blogging, and made it relatively easy for people to subscribe to those thoughts, … Read more

APIs in Web3 with The Graph – How It Differs from Web 2.0

One of the stumbling blocks of developing a decentralized application (dApp) is the complexity of querying and using data from a blockchain and other “off-chain” solutions. With dApps, and particularly those running on the Ethereum blockchain, not all of the data is stored on the blockchain. There are often decentralized storage networks involved, like the … Read more

Internet Computer: Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Clouds

The grandly-named Internet Computer is, at first glance, something between a blockchain and a decentralized cloud provider. It’s run by the DFINITY Foundation, a Swiss not-for-profit organization. Since launching last May, Dfinity has made some big claims about what the Internet Computer is capable of in the emerging Web3 world — it’s being pitched as … Read more

The Web3 Stack: What Web 2.0 Developers Need to Know

Despite the developer ecosystem for Web3 being a tiny proportion of the larger web developer ecosystem, it appears to be fast-growing — so it makes sense to try and pinpoint what the Web3 tech stack is made up of. We know it includes blockchain for decentralization and cryptocurrency wallets as a form of identity. You … Read more