In May 2014, a seminal series of talks in London's East End (likely Whitechapel) introduced the concept of Web3 in the Ethereum context for the first time. This vision articulated how decentralization could extend beyond just computation to support the entire web as a backend.

The founders realized that by extending Ethereum to include data storage and messaging, they could conceive of a "world computer" with three essential components:

• Ethereum - The blockchain as the world computer's CPU, providing decentralized computation and consensus
• Swarm - The disk, providing decentralized storage for application data, hosting, and content distribution
• Whisper - The messaging layer, providing decentralized peer-to-peer communication

This architecture would allow developers to build fully decentralized applications (dapps) without any centralized points of failure. A web application could have its smart contracts on Ethereum, its frontend HTML/JavaScript hosted on Swarm, and real-time communication handled by Whisper.

Viktor Trón recalled in his Early Days of Ethereum interview:

"These founders really realized how decentralization can basically also be extended and logical to support the entire, be the back end of the entire web. And basically if you extend it to data, app data and then hosting and so basically put a data layer on top and then maybe the messaging, then you can conceive of it as the world computer with this holy trinity."

The vision was also accompanied by the famous Web3 diagram showing how applications would interact with these three layers, with both HTML and QML (Qt) considered as potential frontend technologies at the time.

This was also when the distinctive protocol names emerged, using Icelandic letters - the "thorn" character (Þ) appearing in various protocol names, and the "BZZ" and "SSH" naming conventions that Vitalik Buterin introduced.

While Ethereum itself launched successfully in 2015, the full realization of this vision has taken much longer. Swarm continued development within the Ethereum Foundation before spinning out as an independent project in 2019-2021. Whisper was eventually deprecated in favor of other messaging solutions. The dream of truly unstoppable, fully decentralized applications remains a work in progress, with many current dapps still relying on centralized RPC providers and hosting services.