Jack Dorsey’s TBD Announces Web 3 Competitor: Web 5

Jack Dorsey’s beef with Web 3 has never been a secret. In his view, Web 3 – blockchain boosters’ dream of a censorship resistant, privacy-focused internet of the future – has become just as problematic as the Web 2 which preceded it.

Now, he’s out with an alternative.

At Coindesk’s Consensus Festival in Austin, TBD – the Bitcoin-focused subsidiary of Dorsey’s Block (SQ) – announced its new vision for a decentralized internet layer on Friday. Its name? Web 5.

TBD explained its pitch for Web 5 in a statement shared with CoinDesk: “Identity and personal data have become the property of third parties. Web 5 brings decentralized identity and data storage to individual’s applications. It lets devs focus on creating delightful user experiences, while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals.”

A play on the Web 3 moniker embraced in other corners of the blockchain space, Web 5 is built on the idea that incumbent “decentralized internet” contenders are going about things the wrong way.

Appearing at a Consensus panel clad in a a black and bitcoin-yellow track suit emblazoned with the number five, TBD Lead Mike Brock explained that Web 5 – in addition to being “two better than Web 3” – would beat out incumbent models by abandoning their blockchain-centric approaches to a censorship free, identity-focused web experience.

“This is really a conversation about what technologies are built to purpose, and I don’t think that renting block space, in all cases, is a really good idea for decentralized applications,” Brock said.

He continued: “I think what we’re pushing forward with Web 5 – and I admit it’s a provocative challenge to a lot of the assumptions about what it means to decentralize the internet – really actually is back to basics. We already have technologies that effectively decentralize. I mean, bittorrent exists, Tor exists, [et cetera].”

Web 2 + Web 3 = Web 5

Web 5’s monetary layer will be built on the foundation of Bitcoin. This is unsurprising, given Dorsey’s outspoken Bitcoin “maximalism.” The other technologies underpinning Web 5 are borrowed from myriad areas of cryptography and computer science.

Web 5, like Web 3, will enable users to interact with one another without intermediaries. This, in theory, means no threat from government censors or centralized service outages, among other supposed advantages.

Similar to other attempts to create a decentralized layer on top of the web, Web 5 will also aim to provide users with a “decentralized identity” allowing them to seamlessly move from application to application without needing to explicitly log in. User data, rather than getting stored with third party products and services, will be controlled by users and only be exposed with their permission.

While the new project from TBD was announced Friday afternoon CoinDesk’s Consensus festival in Austin, it is still under open-source development and does not have an official release date.