TECHNOLOGIES

Web3

Software built on public blockchains, where users hold their own assets and identity in a wallet instead of in a vendor's database.

Last reviewed: 2026-05-24 byKevin Riedl wiki β†—

Web3 names a family of technologies, not a single thing. The shared property is that user state (assets, identity, sometimes data) lives on a public blockchain instead of in a centralised database. The user signs transactions with a private key they hold. The vendor cannot freeze or delete their account.

In practice the term covers wallets, smart contracts, decentralised exchanges, NFTs, DAOs, account abstraction, ZK-based systems, cross-chain bridges, and the application layer that sits on all of the above. Wavect builds in this space across EVM (Ethereum and its compatible chains), Solana, Cosmos, Polkadot, Near, Ton, and ICP.

The honest version: most Web3 projects do not need a blockchain. The ones that do (assets that must survive the vendor’s bankruptcy, multi-party trust without a central operator, permissionless composability) are valuable. The rest are venture-funded distractions. We will tell you which category you fall into.

// FAQ

FAQs

FAQs

Three tests: do the user’s assets need to survive the company’s bankruptcy, do multiple untrusted parties need to share state without a central operator, do you need permissionless composability with other on-chain systems? If none apply, you do not need web3, you need a database.
Depends on use case. EVM (Ethereum, L2s) for DeFi composability and developer pool. Solana for high throughput and low fees in consumer apps. Cosmos for app-specific chains. Pick the chain that matches the trade-off, not the chain with the loudest marketing this quarter.
Treating the smart contract like normal software. Code is immutable once deployed, value is at stake from minute one, and there is no rollback. Teams that ship without a third-party audit on anything holding non-trivial value learn this the expensive way.