Background & Mission

The Internet began with Web1, a read-only content delivery network. Users could only consume what was offered by site owners, which significantly limited their interaction with the web content.

Web2 introduced the next stage of internet evolution, offering both read and write capabilities. This change transformed the Web into an interactive platform, fostering the growth of technology giants and social media. However, this shift came with its own set of challenges, including centralized content control, data leaks, account restrictions, and censorship, leading to an increased interest in trustless decentralized control of content and assets on the web.

A comparison of Web1, Web2 and Web3.0 infrastructures

Blockchain technology responded to these challenges, heralding the advent of Web3.0. This new web era decentralizes control over user content and assets. The history of each transaction stored within the blockchain is accessible to and verifiable by all network participants, which eliminates the possibility of including false transactions, or altering the history of the ledger. Additionally, blockchain networks have no single point of failure and offer censorship resistance, promoting a truly open and permissionless web.

Bitcoin, the first mass-adopted blockchain, was primarily designed for the decentralized transfer and exchange of value. Ethereum then expanded on this by providing a Layer-1 platform for creating decentralized applications (dApps), introducing the groundbreaking concept of Smart Contracts. These are protocols with built-in security and deterministic execution that allow for the development of logic conditions, essentially functioning as self-executing digital agreements in the Web3.0 ecosystem.

This innovation quickly led to a proliferation of a new category of decentralized applications and assets, including decentralized finance (DeFi), gaming platforms, NFTs, marketplaces and Social Tokens, among others.

Yet, as second-generation blockchain networks such as Ethereum gained popularity, they encountered numerous challenges. The surge in adoption led to issues of scalability, slowed transaction speeds, and escalated transaction costs. Furthermore, the emergence of new blockchains necessitated the development of fresh intercommunication tools and intrinsic interoperability to ensure seamless cross-chain interactions. Moreover, their proof-of-work consensus mechanisms, which consume substantial energy to complete the computations required to add a new block to the chain, drew criticism for their environmental impact. Additionally, Web2 developers are not able to apply design patterns and functionality they are accustomed to, often having to learn unique, domain-specific languages and unconventional methodologies.

Another approach to address these issues, was made by Parity Technologies developed Polkadot, a Layer-0 technology that bridges different blockchains into a single, unified network. Polkadot fosters a collaborative system where blockchains coexist and complement each other, leading to a diverse network of multifunctional blockchain services.

Despite the promising potential of Polkadot, participation in its ecosystem can be associated with significant barriers to entry for developers, who had to acquire a parachain slot first. In addition, Polkadot itself does not support arbitrary logic programs and smart contracts, and existing smart contract parachains do not solve the issues of onboarding Web2 developers to Web3.0 as composability for dApps on such chains is limited.

Gear was conceived to overcome these barriers. Built on Substrate, Gear serves as a developer-friendly programming platform for decentralized applications and a technology that can be used to deploy Layer-1 standalone networks. The vision for Gear is to empower developers to deploy next-generation Web3.0 applications in the easiest, most efficient way possible, using the underlying network that best suits their application and users’ specific needs.