Web 3.0 and Centralized Exchanges: How Crypto Exchanges Will Work in the Decentralized Internet Era

To begin with, let's define the concept of what WEB 3.0 is. Ordinal number 3 tells us that there were also 1.0 and 2.0

• Web 1.0 (1989-2005), or the static Internet, was the first one and offered access to only a limited amount of information without interacting with users.
• Web 2.0 (2005-present) is the interactive Internet (YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia) with web technologies such as Javascript, HTML5, and CSS3.

What does the next generation of the Internet mean?

It is primarily decentralization, ubiquity, and artificial intelligence. Web 3.0 is about DAO, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, the Internet of things, metaverses, and NFTs.

We see that the main focus of Web 2.0 is centralization, and Web 3.0 is decentralization. In the current version of the Internet, your account or account can be easily blocked, in the ideal world of Web 3.0, only you are in control.

Even though we live in the illusion of cryptocurrencies, metauniverses and NFTs, under the conditions of sanctions and increased political friction between economic marcoregimes, we see that we are still very far from web 3.0. It is impossible to buy NFTs from the sanctioned countries (without a VPN) on the largest marketplaces; restrictions are introduced on the purchase of cryptocurrency on a national basis, and so on.

Yes, CEXs and other platforms undoubtedly use the technologies that makeup Web 3.0, but so far, it's more of junk in a beautiful wrapper.

It is evident that although states do not keep pace with technology, they do not want to lose control over finances (this applies not only to finance but also to medicine, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, etc.). That is why cryptocurrencies are banned in China, but CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) is developing. With the use of CBDC, excellent opportunities open up: money becomes genuinely "smart".

And if BTC, ETH, and any open cryptocurrency are difficult to use as a means of payment (for several reasons, including technical ones), CBDC is already being used more and more widely.

Thus, we see how the development of technology changes the essence of money.

As the organizer of trading, exchanges will undoubtedly fall under these changes. CEXs are ordinary exchanges with high-risk market instruments (cryptocurrencies) at their core. Now the regulation of this area is quite active (issuing licences, audits, KYC and AML, etc.), since the Wild West period has passed, and cryptocurrencies have become a rather serious business.

I note that everything that cryptocurrency exchanges are accused of is inherent in their older brothers (stock exchanges) only on a more global scale. Speculation, fraud, money laundering, etc - all this was and is being done without cryptocurrencies and crypto exchanges. So the development of CEX made it possible to speculate more quickly (you can't speculate much on the New York Stock Exchange with high-frequency bots).

The critical problem of Web 3.0 today is security issues: bridges and protocols break with enviable regularity, which, by the way, often occur due to the fact that existing patterns are trying to shift to a decentralized basis. Although many purely technical problems have not yet been solved, some promising technologies are remarkable (quantum computing, quantum teleportation, strong AI). They may qualitatively change decentralized systems, as the paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" by Satoshi Nakamoto once did.