Recently, Web3 has gained massive attention by major analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, Forbes Technology Council and the Harvard Business Review. The Web3 vision takes blockchain disintermediation to a next level by making it ubiquitous, encompassing not only payments and financial services but also digital identities, data and business models. Albeit the current enthusiasm, it is still not clear how Web3 can actually be implemented. Therefore, in this talk, we want to share and discuss with you our recent insights from a series of blockchain-related research and engineering efforts. We start our journey with KSI Cash, a sharded blockchain technology with unlimited scalability that we have designed for the European Central Bank in order to assess the feasibility of a digital euro. Next, we explain the concept of a next generation blockchain platform, called Alphabill, which enables universal asset tokenization and transfer as a global medium of exchange. Furthermore, we reflect on the necessary theoretical foundations of scalable implementations of blockchain-based payment systems.