My friend Mike Costache invited me to the Futurist conference in Toronto, where apart from many things, I am expecting to see some clarity around the integration of technologies, which means Blockchain, Metaverse, and Web4.0. There is a certain logic to this integrated thought, which I have articulated in some of my previous writings, however computation, maturity, critical mass, incentives, interoperability, frivolousness, and fees cloud the future of blockchain.
Mathew Ball’s "Meta-Verse is brilliantly crafted but lacks conviction about the blockchain future. Rather Ball relies on Tim Sweeney’s perspective of blockchain being an essential requirement for Metaverse. The cloudiness between the future built on blockchain and the future with blockchain are two contrasting futures. In the latter, blockchain is just another technology that did not live up to its promise. Looking at the future is not easy and even if it was, there is always another Yahoo and Google, clueless about what the future holds. But this does not mean, we can’t rely on history to get insights for the future and make a more informed view.
As an alumni mentor at 500 Global and many times, while interacting with other startup founders, I see the same blockchain polarity. There is on one side a founder building the future on blockchain and another one who can’t see the tech’s utility. This somewhere reminds me of Thomas Watson's 1943 forecast of a market for 5 computers. The famous infamous list goes on from television, to telephone, to airplanes, to computer memory, to wireless...
Web 4.0, the intelligent web is built on blockchain because intelligence is for everyone, and nobody controls it, it is accessible, transactable, a default computational and market mechanism. A level playing field where there will be something new fighting with Apple, something new disintermediating Amazon. Understanding this future needs to accept that intelligence is an asset that needs to be extracted. Extraction is a cost. Cost needs incentives. And there are no incentives without community. This is not a chicken and egg problem. What we are seeing with crypto are the early stages of the evolution of incentives and marketplace on the blockchain infrastructure. The fact that the community refuses to go home and is already proud of its CityDao initiatives, we are ready for some exponential growth, which should reflext in a multi decade revival of crypto assets (NFTs, Crypto Currencies, Dao’s).
Blockchain is not at the crossroads, it is becoming the incumbent and is no more a data ledger because it has already bundled interdisciplinary data, it is not securitizing those data sets as new financial assets, and it has started to offer a mechanism to exchange these assets. Blockchain is already a market mechanism. And Smart money has no religion. Geographical biases used to be behavioral biases. Just like liquidity, smart money has no religion. If sex shops bingo and sewage can define a new era of pension portfolios then to believe that the global investor is tied to a geography or an asset class is a chimera. Marketplaces have become more fungible. Stock exchanges are inherently fragmented at a geographical level, at an asset level, and at an instrument level. Blockchains are going to change the 150-year-old thinking around stock exchange.
We are living in the Intelligence age driven by the conceptual age, the age of context, where intelligence is a commodity. The world’s information is transcending from specificity to generality, traversing from one domain to another, from one context to another, something beyond what we think are challenges of interoperability. The future is an integrated blockchain, metaverse, and web4.0, operating seamlessly as the Intelligent Web.
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