What the heck is Web3 and why is everyone and their mother talking about it? In short, Web3 is a decentralized web-based on blockchain technology. What that means, how Web3 actually functions, and what it means for the future of the internet is a bit more complicated… To understand what makes Web3 so special and so different, we first need to understand why it's called “Web3” and what came online before it.

Queen Elizabeth II received a blockchain journal in the post, and was “interested to learn that the publication is the first open access blockchain research journal available both in print and online, according to a letter from her office. In a letter to the British Blockchain Association, which sent the journal, a member of her office said the queen “much appreciated thoughtful gesture,” as first reported by the Financial Times.

This is the the last of a 2-part blog post series regarding Netdata and Geth. If you missed the first, be sure to check it out here. Geth is short for Go-Ethereum and is the official implementation of the Ethereum Client in Go. Currently it’s one of the most widely used implementations and a core piece of infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem. With this proof of concept I wanted to showcase how easy it really is to gather data from any Prometheus endpoint and visualize them in Netdata.

Microsoft recently reported two widespread cryptomining attacks targeting Kubeflow, a popular cloud-native platform for machine learning (ML) workloads on Kubernetes. Attackers targeted Kubeflow installations using either the Kubeflow central dashboard interface or Kubeflow Pipelines interface for scheduling crypto-mining workloads.

The way we ‘data’ is about to change, and Splunk’s Connect for Ethereum (aka EthLogger) is helping organizations to adapt. Splunk Connect for Ethereum enables organizations of all sizes to investigate, monitor, analyze and act upon their rapidly growing blockchain data sets across multiple chains.

All the work presented in this blog post is open source and available as part of our Splunk Connect for Ethereum repository examples, including the instrumentation of Besu as a Docker container, the configuration of Splunk, and two applications showing how to monitor Besu syncing to the chain.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about why you don’t need a blockchain. Blockchain is one long transaction log that always gets written to and is never backed up. It’s a ledger, more or less, with some math. And while distributed ledgers can be useful for some scenarios, I’m here today to say you still don’t need a blockchain. What turns a distributed ledger into a blockchain is cryptography for creating a digital signature to reduce the risk of data tampering.