"Web3 is the future, and the future is now", although very few persons understand this statement, and are comfortable with it, a lot of other people are still confused. The very fast evolution of technology has become a thing of complexity to a lot of persons, even those within the tech space. The ease and enjoyment of today’s web emerged from the combined efforts of millions of people taking advantage of “permissionless innovation” — the ability to create content and applications without asking anyone first. Regrettably, the lack of freedom for data has resulted in an adverse environment for the interests of its participants.
A small number of companies have enticed vast numbers of users to join them, monopolizing the advantage of permissionless innovation, by luring them in with network effects and controlling them by holding their data to prevent them from seeking alternatives. Also, these minute percentage but massive platforms have enticed applications and developers to build atop their ecosystems gaining some kind of control over the functionality of these applications and ideas, before either cutting off access or actively opposing their interests when the applications become too successful. These actions have in so many ways stifled innovation and effectively monopolized vast sections of the web.
In the future, monopolization of the web can be curbed by using new technologies to re-enable the initial intent behind the idea of permissionless innovation, in a way that creates a more open web where users are free and applications are supportive and independent of a central authority.
Seeing the power of this kind of freedom in the financial sector, where decentralized digital currencies like Bitcoin and their underlying blockchain technology have facilitated billions of dollars of peer-to-peer transfers at a fraction of the price of the traditional banking system. The same underlying technology also allows participants in the $50B+ virtual goods economy to track, take ownership, and trade these goods permissionless among themselves. All these features are that of a decentralized system, where there is no autonomy of power, and rights, and this is simply what web3 is about, extricating the idea of centralization. In a centralized system, an error in/on the central authority will affect and possibly shut down every application built on its ecosystem. Asides from that, the following players can all directly change the value of any balances they come into contact with:
The developer who controls the release or update of the application’s code
The platform where the data is stored
The servers which run the application’s code
Even if all of these players intend to operate with professionalism and good faith, the actions of governments, police forces, and hackers can easily turn their hands against their users, leading them to censor, modify or steal the balances they are supposed to protect.
A fully decentralized system doesn’t have an “off” switch and it doesn’t have a way for nefarious forces to impose their will on the applications built on top of it. There are lots of developing decentralized systems emerging right now, but just like in everything good, there are always a few bad. In as much as the idea behind decentralization is awesome, we should not jump on every and any decentralized system, a lookout for ones with long-term positive scalability and usefulness is key. Here are four decentralized systems that could be considered to be good.
NEAR
HIVE
OCEAN PROTOCOL
HELIUM
NEAR is a decentralized application platform with the potential to change how systems are designed, how applications are built, and how the web itself works. It is a complex technology with a simple goal — allow developers and entrepreneurs to easily and sustainably build applications that secure high-value assets like money and identity while making them performant and usable enough for consumers to access.
The Near protocol operates, using a method called sharding, where a procession of transactions is split among all participating nodes in the system, allowing hundreds of transactions to run concurrently and very fast too. It uses the same core underlying technology that made Bitcoin an unkillable currency and combines it with cutting-edge advances in community consensus, database sharding, and usability. On this web, everything from new currencies to new applications to new industries can be created, opening the door to a brand new future, which runs atop the NEAR Protocol blockchain. This blockchain, which runs across hundreds of machines around the world, is organized to be permissionless, performant, and secure enough to create a strong and decentralized data layer for the new web.
NEAR looks to create the only community-run cloud storage enough to extend the reach of open finance, and power the future of the open web. Essentially, NEAR is a platform for running applications that have access to a shared and secure pool of money, identity, and data that is owned by their users. The organization and governance structure is designed to rapidly ship and continuously evolve the protocol so it will never become obsolete.
This decentralized system is focused on creating an independent and free platform for all technological applications, ideas, transactions, and more, whilst ensuring that all these are run in record time(seconds), and each user possesses full control of operations running. The ultimate purpose of web3 is to achieve complete decentralization and this system looks to offer that, by maintaining anonymity and freedom of its users and ease of use for its developers. Also, this system has a token(NEAR) which stands as a means of exchange units ecosystem, and with continuous positive growth of the ecosystem, the value of that token increases.
It must be noted that, as with all complex systems under active development, change is inevitable. One of the hallmarks of the NEAR approach is rapid and pragmatic iteration. The latest information about the protocol can be found in; Posts on the blog at near.org/blog, Live chat channels at near.chat and In the reference code base at, github.com/nearprotocol near.org/papers/the-official-near-white-paper
HIVE is an innovative and forward-looking decentralized blockchain and ecosystem built on the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) protocol. It is a decentralized system serving as a web where all online activities can be speedily and effectively, published and stored. Myriad apps, APIs, and front-ends contribute to the general and straightforward accessibility of data, transactions, and records so that this existing diversity and utility ensure that the ecosystem is welcoming to content creators, consumers, investors, and builders. Hive is developed to store vast amounts of content and to make it available for time-based monetization.
The performance of the blockchain is designed to scale with the widespread adoption of the currency and platforms in mind. By combining the lightning-fast processing times and fee-less transactions, Hive also aims to overcome mainstream adoption shortcomings in blockchain technology and content publishing by improving their accessibility. It leverages the coined Proof-of-Brain (PoB) concept by distributing a portion of the inflation to content creators and consumers. To earn without financial investment, individuals partake in a wide range of activities, just like airdrops, but in this case, instead of referrals, it'll be activities like blogging, participating in discussions, curating others, building and engaging with apps, playing games and more; their limits are only constrained by their imagination to further the decentralization of the system. All content is always readily available on the blockchain and retains its original integrity.
Hive was created as an independent and decentralized fork of the Steem blockchain. As a community-driven fork, it intends to continue the strong community values that have been established.
The Hive network comes with two classes of cryptocurrency assets named HIVE and Hive Backed Dollars (HBD). Moreover, HIVE exists both under a liquid form (simply called HIVE) and a staked form (called Hive Power). HIVE is the liquid currency of the Hive ecosystem. It may be traded, staked, bought, and sold. It is the universal means of exchange in the Hive system. Hive Backed Dollars are intended to be pegged to the United States Dollar (USD) at a one-to-one rate.
A key feature of the Hive decentralized system is the no transaction fee(gas fee) for transactions on its system. Hive uses a fee-less system that leverages rechargeable Resource Credits (RC). Each account holds a given amount of credits related to its stake. Those credits are then consumed when transactions are executed on the blockchain and automatically recovered with time. This fee-less feature encourages vast adoption, in turn increasing the value of the ecosystem.
OCEAN PROTOCOL is a network that concentrates on AI. It aims to spread the benefits of AI by equalizing the opportunity to access data. A protocol and network—a tokenized ecosystem is being built to achieve this aim. This network will be used as a foundational substrate to power a new ecosystem of data marketplaces, and more broadly, data sharing for the public good.
Ocean has the functionality to reconcile the spread of data with privacy and the commons. It has infrastructure for service agreements and access control, which allows computing to be brought to the data. It has cryptographic proof-of-service and network rewards to incentivize relevant AI data & services. Ocean design uses on-chain bounties to ensure long-term sustainability and improvement as a public network. Finally, Ocean will ensure a spread of benefits and control by going permissionless.
It is no news that the world has evolved rapidly into the adaptation of AI(Artificial Intelligence). The Ocean protocol looks to create a decentralized system, where data can easily be accessed through the aid of AIs. This means that there would be no limitation to a set of data needed to be acquired, so long as the keyword is entered in. This protocol would be very effective for intelligence agencies and companies, and on successful scaling, the value of its ecosystem token(OCEAN), would also increase adding more value.
HELIUM network is a decentralized wireless network that enables devices anywhere in the world to wirelessly connect to the Internet and geolocate themselves without the need for power-hungry satellite location hardware or expensive cellular plans. The Helium network is powered by a blockchain with a native protocol token incentivizing a two-sided marketplace between coverage providers and coverage consumers. With the introduction of a blockchain, decentralization is injected. The result is that wireless network coverage becomes a commodity, fueled by competition, available anywhere in the world, at a fraction of current costs. Our secure and open-source primitives enable developers are enabled to build low-power, Internet-connected devices quickly and cost-effectively, through secure and open-source primitives.
The Helium network has a wide variety of applications across industries and is the first decentralized wireless network of its kind. The blockchain runs on a new consensus protocol, called the Helium Consensus Protocol, and a new kind of proof, called Proof-of-Coverage.
The above Decentralized networks have the best ecosystems and all boast of a token as their means of exchange. These tokens rise in value, as each ecosystem begins to grow vast and bigger.
It is important to note that this is not in any way financial advice or promotion of any sort, any action, taken after reading this, is solely your responsibility.