Web3 is an umbrella term — often: user-controlled wallets, assets and logic on blockchains, and dApps that read/write chain state. It is not the same as WebRTC, IPFS, or Nostr, though projects compose them (e.g. NFT metadata on IPFS, social graphs off-chain).
A wallet holds key material used to sign transactions and messages. Your address is derived from public key material; on-chain ownership and permissions reference these addresses. UX is harder than password login — bridges, seed phrases, and hardware keys are part of the story.
Compare to Nostr: also key-centric, but social events are cheap to publish and do not require global consensus on every post.
Smart contracts are programs whose outputs are validated by the network’s rules — enabling tokens, marketplaces, games, and DAOs. They are powerful and expensive to change once deployed; bugs can be catastrophic.
Coffee Academy stays conceptual — real security requires audits, formal methods, and sober economics, not tutorial hype.
| Layer | Primary question | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Realtime peer | How do two browsers stream or send bytes? | WebRTC, PeerJS, TURN |
| Content file network | How do we name and fetch immutable blobs? | IPFS, CIDs, gateways |
| Signed social feed | Who said what, without one company’s DB? | Nostr events & relays |
| Global state | What does everyone agree happened, on-chain? | Chains, wallets, contracts |
Hybrid stacks win in practice: HTTP + WebRTC + optional IPFS + optional Nostr + optional chain hooks, chosen per feature. This track gives vocabulary; shipping is picking the smallest tool that fits the user story — and owning the ops cost.
Track complete. Revisit the overview or continue in Home Cloud for LAN and self-hosting vocabulary.