Fundamental Labs
3
We believe that that Web3, the next iteration of the internet, will be
built on decentralized technology across three fundamental pillars:
consensus, storage, and computation.
Blockchain technology is what set off a revolution of decentralization and brought about the concept
of Web3, representing the idea to not only decentralize consensus, but to use this technology to
decentralize the rest of the internet too.
“Web3 is the stack of protocols that enable fully decentralized applications.” – Nader Dabit
Just like Web2, Web3 is a complex amalgamation of a wide array of technologies that together form
the Web3 ecosystem. Despite its complexity, we can break down the ecosystem into three key
infrastructural pillars that need to be developed to achieve full decentralization of the internet:
consensus, storage, and computation.
Consensus has matured quickly since Bitcoin’s launch in 2009, with dozens of other successful models
of decentralized consensus having been brought to life since then. Over time attempts at
decentralizing storage and computation have emerged that aim to complement these to build the
next pillars of a truly decentralized internet.
Figure 1: Illustrative slice of projects enabling each of the Web 3 pillars
In this piece we will look at decentralized storage, which describes peer-to-peer networks, in which
members combine disk space to create what is essentially a global hard drive that is trustless,
immutable, and in some cases permanent and censorship-resistant.
