Glossary
Web3
A loose umbrella term for an internet whose applications use public blockchains for state, identity, and payments instead of a private database.
"Web3" is the marketing label for applications built on public blockchains — wallets as identity, tokens as units of value, smart contracts as backend logic. Detractors point out that the term blurs together cryptocurrency, NFTs, decentralized identity, and a vague sense of "user-owned internet" that is mostly aspirational.
It is most useful as shorthand: when someone says "Web3 startup", they almost always mean an app whose core state lives on an EVM chain or a comparable Layer-1.