Towards Web3 Applications Easing the Access and Transition

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arXiv:2210.05903v3 [cs.SE] 16 Oct 2023

Towards Web3 Applications: Easing the Access and

Transition

GUANGSHENG YU, Data61, CSIRO, Australia

XU WANG, GBDTC, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

QIN WANG, Data61, CSIRO, Australia

TINGTING BI, Data61, CSIRO, Australia

YIFEI DONG, GBDTC, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

REN PING LIU, GBDTC, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

NEKTARIOS GEORGALAS, Applied Research, British Telecom, UK

ANDREW REEVES, Applied Research, British Telecom, UK

Web3 is leading a wave of the next generation of web services that even many Web2 applications are keen

to ride. However, the lack of Web3 background for Web2 developers hinders easy and eﬀective access and

transition. On the other hand, Web3 applications desire encouragement and advertisement from conventional

Web2 companies and projects due to their low market shares. In this paper, we propose a seamless transition

framework that transits Web2 to Web3, named WebttCom1, after exploring the connotation of Web3 and

the key diﬀerences between Web2 and Web3 applications. We also provide a full-stack implementation as a

use case to support the proposed framework, followed by performance evaluation and surveys with ∼1,000

participants that show ∼80% positive and ∼20% neutral responses. We conﬁrm that the proposed framework

WebttCom addresses the deﬁned research question, and the implementation well satisﬁes the framework

WebttCom in terms of strong necessity,usability, and completeness based on the survey results.

CCS Concepts: •Information systems →Web interfaces;

Additional Key Words and Phrases: Web3, Web2, DApp, Blockchain, Service Mannagement System

1 INTRODUCTION

Web3 has drawn intensive attention from communities and investors. As an umbrella term,

Web3 covers a series of blockchain-based decentralized applications (DApps), services, and eco-

nomics [1–5] that bring signiﬁcant impacts on both traditional ﬁnance and cryptocurrency mar-

kets. To date (as of Mar 2023), over 12,143 DApps2have been developed on-chain and 285,152

smart contracts are deployed across 48 protocols. A total of 1.67M users are actively interacting

with the smart contracts within 24 hours, as evidenced by their wallet addresses. In this sense,

Web3 impresses users by providing such a connect the wallet button on the upper-right corner of

each webpage. Users can use DApps through embedded wallet entries by invoking speciﬁc func-

tions that are deployed on blockchain-engined platforms (e.g., Ethereum [6]). The shift of backend

servers from centralized clouds to decentralized chains has mostly distinguished Web3 and previ-

ous web styles.

1WebttCom stands for Web2 (Two)–Web3 (Three) Communicator.

2Data source [Mar 2023]: DappRadar https://dappradar.com/industry-overview.

Authors’ addresses: Guangsheng Yu, Data61, CSIRO, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2121, Saber.Yu@data61.csiro.au; Xu Wang,

GBDTC, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2007, Xu.Wang-1@uts.edu.au; Qin Wang, Data61,

CSIRO, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2121, qinwangtech@gmail.com; Tingting Bi, Data61, CSIRO, Melbourne, VIC, Australia,

3168, Tingting.Bi@data61.csiro.au; Yifei Dong, GBDTC, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2007,

Yifei.Dong@uts.edu.au; Ren Ping Liu, GBDTC, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2007, RenP

ing.Liu@uts.edu.au; Nektarios Georgalas, Applied Research, British Telecom, Martlesham, Woodbridge, UK, IP5 3RE, ne

ktarios.georgalas@bt.com; Andrew Reeves, Applied Research, British Telecom, Martlesham, Woodbridge, UK, IP5 3RE,

andrew.reeves@bt.com.

, Vol. 1, No. 1, Article . Publication date: October 2023.

Following its narrative connotation, we observe that Web3 users still occupy a pretty small per-

centage (appr. 0.03% of 4.95B3Internet users) over the Internet. The constraints majorly come from

its incompatibility: (i) a typical Web3 application cannot be smoothly applied in a traditional web

context due to the absence of blockchain engines; conversely, (ii) a traditional Web2 application

can hardly be integrated with blockchain due to the lack of proper Application Programming In-

terfaces (APIs). Rational developers would start their work on wide-adoption applications, namely

Web2 Apps, for higher user exposure and more potential revenues rather than sparing eﬀorts on

Web3 applications that are uncertain. Such concerns motivate this work:

How to ease the usage of Web3 applications and achieve a smooth transition of applications between

the Web2 and Web3 space?

We investigate the bottlenecks of the transition between Web2 and Web3 by diving into their dis-

tinctions in design and implementation. For most Web2 applications, user management, data ma-

nipulation, and private-preserving policies are constructed upon centralized databases in a closed

manner. In contrast, Web3 DApps usually apply asymmetric-encryption-based identity to estab-

lish more secure and robust user management in a decentralized manner among many parties

without prior trustworthiness [7–10]. Data manipulation diﬀers from that of Web2 applications

due to the immutability of data storage in Web3, and access control also requires new approaches

to partition the visibility. In addition, existing Web3 DApps lack ﬂexible mechanisms to smooth

the workﬂow of documenting Restful APIs and test suites during the development phase. There-

fore, the incompatible user management strategies, execution procedures for data manipulation,

private-preserving policies, and the lack of Web3-compatible API tools have greatly retarded the

smooth transition of applications in diﬀerent domains.

To ﬁll the above gaps, in this work, we propose a practical solution to integrate both Web3

and Web2 applications and related services seamlessly. We deconstruct the Web2 architecture and

extract three major components: frontend APIs, backend servers, and supplementary databases.

Aligning with the core principles of Web3, we accordingly modify these components to enable

seamless integration with blockchain engines. Speciﬁcally, we design three types of adjustable

components: a SaaS module for integrating Web2 software by providing generalized APIs, a back-

end interpreter that interprets and forwards requests from Web2 to Web3, a blockchain layer that

conﬁgures self-governed policies via smart contracts as well as computes on-chain calculations

through chain Software Development Kits (SDKs). Our proposed solutions can greatly promote

the transition from classic Web2 applications to the Web3 space without redundant development

or complicated middleware. In short, we highlight the contributions as follows.

•We explore the connotation of Web3 by investigating plenty of in-the-wild Web3 projects. As a

new concept, we compare existing Web2 solutions and so-claimed Web3 projects to deter-

mine the root features of Web3 applications and their dependencies, extracting their diﬀer-

ences from classic Web2 applications.

•Based on comprehensive investigation, we propose a seamless transition framework that tran-

sits Web2 to Web3, named WebttCom. Our proposed solution establishes an interpreter to

bridge the Web2 applications and the Web3 backend engines. In particular, the proposed

framework WebttCom can oﬀer eﬀective and reliable access control and user management

across the decentralized Web3 and centralized Web2 and provide an approach to conduct

transition with existing popular SaaS and the framework. While operating, WebttCom can

also eﬀectively improve production by automatically generating API documents for devel-

opers and communities.

3Data source: Digital 2022: Global Overview Report https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2022-global-overview-report.

•We provide a full-stack implementation ranging from front and backend APIs, structure design,

and smart contract programming to the on-cloud dockerized deployment. Code size reaches up

to 11,351 lines4. The system is applied to daily service management processes and promotes

the establishment of eﬀective, ﬂexible, reliable, and trustworthy Web3-driven applications.

Our prototype has been inspected by British Telecom (BT) in practice.

•We further conducted a quantitative performance evaluation and a qualitative evaluation from

the perspectives of managers, investors, and developers through surveys targeting 1,000 practi-

tioners. The survey feedback shows that the research question is well satisﬁed by the pro-

posed framework WebttCom, and the presented full-stack implementation proves its strong

capability of smoothing the transition in terms of necessity,usability, and completeness.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the Web3 basics. Section 3

proposes the research methodology and presents our research question. Section 4 introduces a use

case that implements the new pattern, followed by discussions about the implementation notices

and limitations shown in Section 5. Section 6 provides existing studies related to this work. Sec-

tion 7 concludes this paper and highlights our contributions.

2 APPROACHING WEB3: A PRELIMINARY

In this section, we show the Web3 basics by comparing with Web2 and providing a typical Web3

instance.

2.1 Diﬀerences between Web 1/2 and Web3

Traditional Internet, including so-claimed Web1 and Web2, has been developed for decades.

Web1 is regarded as a suite of read-only protocols that contain static sites to present images, text,

and videos. Users search for the targets by accessing web portals. Web2 changes the way of interac-

tion by enabling user-generation content (UGC). Users can publish their original content, such as

images, reviews, testimonials, or even podcasts, on social media websites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter).

In this sense, Web2 is regarded as read-write. Web3 diﬀers from previous styles by adding features

of ownership and transfer. Users will create self-controlled accounts, generally in the forms of

wallets, to manage digital assets and virtual data. Rather than relying on centralized servers, Web3

users can freely transfer their assets under the governance of smart contracts, which brings the ad-

vantages of auto-execution, being accountable, and being globally veriﬁed. These smart contracts

connect both upper-layer DApps and underlying blockchain platforms.

Table 1. Comparisons among Web1/Web2/Web3 and Our Work

Functions Architecture Instance

Web1 read client-server Yahoo

Web2 read/write client-server Facebook, Google

Web3 read/write/own/transfer client-SC-chain Ethereum, BSC

Web2→3read/write/own/transfer client-Int.-SC-chain WebttCom

4Speciﬁcally, we present the detailed size distribution. The front end takes 4 MB with image resources, while 253 KB with

code only (5367 lines). The backend is a 1.3 MB project and 249 KB for codes (4831 lines). Web3 takes 265KB (1153 lines).

Note that the source code is set conﬁdential due to the non-disclosure agreement with British Telecom (BT).

2.2 Typical Web3 Architecture

Tradition web architecture is based on a client-server model. The client is used for sending and

receiving requests, while the server is used to process these requests and corresponding logic. The

server side, also known as the backend, covers many fundamental aspects like operating systems

(Windows, Linux), platforms (.Net, LAMP), and storage. API is to connect the application tier to

servers. In contrast, the Web3 architecture replaces centralized backend servers with distributed

ledgers. The backend contains two sectors, smart contracts (SC) for deﬁning logic and rules, and

blockchain platforms for processing transactions and achieving consensus. Web3 is more complex

than traditional Web2 due to its complete decentralization, which requires dealing with the con-

sistency problem [11]. In this work, we aim to ease the transition between the Web2 application

tier and blockchain-backend systems. We establish an interpreter (short for Int.) to connect them

seamlessly.

2.3 Essential Component

We provide basic building blocks to construct Web3 applications: a series of blockchain-speciﬁc

components covering blockchain, smart contracts, on-chain applications, and clients.

Blockchain. Blockchain is a digital ledger that operates in a decentralized manner to securely

and transparently record transactions [12]. Transactions are recorded as blocks, which are subse-

quently organized into a hierarchical structure. The blocks are arranged in a chronological and

unalterable sequence to form the blockchain. To add a new block to the chain, a process called

"mining" is used, which involves solving complex mathematical problems to validate transactions

and add new blocks to the blockchain. This mining process is regulated by a consensus mechanism,

which sets rules to ensure that all participants in the blockchain network agree on the validity of

the transactions and their order in the blockchain.

Smart contract. Smart contracts are computer programs that automatically enforce the terms of

an agreement between parties. They are used to speed up, verify, or execute digital negotiations.

Ethereum developed smart contracts on the blockchain system by using Turing-complete scripting

languages to achieve complex functionalities and execute thorough state transitions via consensus

algorithms, resulting in ﬁnal consistency. Smart contracts enable unfamiliar parties to conduct fair

exchanges without the need for a trusted third party. They have a broad range of applications,

including ﬁnancial services [13][14], security protocols [15], and decentralized governance [16].

Smart contracts are viewed as a disruptive technology that could revolutionize many industries

by improving eﬃciency, reducing costs, and eliminating the need for intermediaries.

On-chain application. On-chain applications, also known as DApps, are applications that run

on blockchain systems [17]. Unlike traditional applications, which are centralized and controlled

by a single entity, on-chain applications are decentralized and operate on distributed networks.

The applications are designed to be transparent, secure, and trustless. They use smart contracts

to execute code and transactions, and the consensus mechanism of the underlying blockchain

network to verify and validate these transactions. Thanking the nature of decentralization, they

are resistant to censorship, tampering, and other forms of malicious activity [18]. For speciﬁc usage,

on-chain applications include various types such as NFT [19], gaming, social networking, etc.

Light client. A light client [20] plays a crucial role in the world of Web3 and blockchain technol-

ogy, acting as an intermediary between user requests and the back-end servers or blockchains. Its

primary function is to forward user requests to their appropriate destination without engaging

in any logic processes. Generally, a light client is represented by a wallet [21] in the context of

Web3 or blockchain. It is supported by locally running light nodes, which synchronize informa-

tion with full nodes. This makes using a light client highly advantageous in resource-constrained

environments, such as diﬀerent hardware devices, as it can reduce the costs of performing com-

plex computations on-chain [22–24]. In the Web3 ecosystem, it is typical for users to connect their

wallets to perform interactive actions on the website. By understanding the role of a light client,

users can navigate the complexities of Web3 and blockchain technology with ease.

3 RESEARCH DESIGN

In this section, we conduct an exploratory study [25], which proposes a new Web3 driven frame-

work, named WebttCom, for implementing applications; and we deﬁne the research question (RQ)

for identifying and extracting the evidence (e.g., the beneﬁts of Web3 applications) for evaluating

our proposed Web3 framework.

3.1 Research estion

This study aims to design and analyze whether our Web3 framework is eﬀective and practical

regarding quality attributes (i.e., smooth transition) and development productivity. Such charac-

terization of Web3 will shed light on future Web3 applications and developments. Speciﬁcally, this

work aims to address the Research Question (RQ) as:

Given the proposed Web3 framework (i.e., WebttCom), is it eﬀective, regarding the transi-

tion of Web2 to Web3 application development?

•Web2 to Web3 transition: Given that many developers do not have relevant development

background for Web3 applications, is the proposed framework practical and helpful for them

to transit the Web2 to Web3 applications for meeting and implementing the speciﬁc require-

ments?

•Data privacy and governance: In the evolution from Web2 to Web3, various issues related

to data privacy and security, data privacy and governance in Web3 is one of the most dis-

cussed challenges for diﬀerent stakeholders. As such, to address this concern, our RQ can

explore whether the proposed Web3 framework (i.e., WebttCom) ensures data privacy and

governance.

•Development productivity: If the proposed Web3 framework impacts developers’ pro-

ductivity? For example, (1) practitioners’ daily development tasks and documentation. (2)

problem-solving for Web3 application development.

3.2 Study Design Process

Our research methodology consists of three stages, as depicted in Fig. 1. In the ﬁrst stage, we

proposed a Web3 transition framework (i.e., WebttCom), which includes an interpreter to help

practitioners transit and bridge the Web2-based to Web3-based applications. We implemented a

full-stack project based on the proposed WebttCom in the second stage. In the last stage, to eval-

uate the eﬀectiveness of the proposed WebttCom and the feasibility of the full-stack project, we

conducted a quantitative performance evaluation and carried out a qualitative survey with 1,000

practitioners, including Venture Capitals (VCs), business managers, and developers, to gather their

feedback and opinions.

Phase 1: Web3 driven framework. We proposed a Web3 framework (WebttCom), which allows

developers to implement eﬀective and reliable applications. The framework guarantees:

•Web2 to Web3 smooth transition: our framework provides a trustworthy transition.

•Blockchain backend: the framework ensures the decentralization of Web3-driven applica-

tions.

The details of the framework are described in Section 4.1.

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arXiv:2210.05903v3[cs.SE]16Oct2023TowardsWeb3Applications:EasingtheAccessandTransitionGUANGSHENGYU,Data61,CSIRO,AustraliaXUWANG,GBDTC,UniversityofTechnologySydney,AustraliaQINWANG,Data61,CSIRO,AustraliaTINGTINGBI,Data61,CSIRO,AustraliaYIFEIDONG,GBDTC,UniversityofTechnologySydney,AustraliaRENPINGLIU,...

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