Permissionless
Permissionless, organised by Blockworks and bankless, was my first blockchain conference. Over three days, I sat through over 20 hours of high quality content. My purpose was to understand the language rather than the tech, and get a sense of what are the themes being discussed. My starting belief was that there is a fundamentally new Internet being built, bringing back memories of the mid-1990s. I was not wrong; the excitement among the speakers brought back the heady days of the early Internet era, one which I saw and participated in first hand.
Here is how I framed the past 15-odd years of the rise of the crypto. One track has been about bitcoin and the rise of all other cryptocurrencies. This seeks to challenge fiat currencies which are being debased by money printing by central banks since the 2008 financial crisis and compounded through the pandemic years. A second track has been to apply the blockchain principles to finance leading to the rise of Ethereum, smart contracts, DeFi (decentralised finance) and stablecoins. (The week prior to the conference had seen the blow-up of Terra-Luna and the loss of $50 billion, but that did not dampen the spirit and the core principles.) A third track that has emerged in the past couple of years has been the growing popularity of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). These will now extend into multiple disciplines – from creators and brands to gaming and social. DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) is another construct that is being discussed.
My view, reinforced after the conference, is that these are early days in the creation of the next generation Internet infrastructure – decentralised, permissionless, ownership, built on cryptography, enabled by blockchain. It is up to entrepreneurs to ask the question: what is centralised today that can be decentralised? And from there will sprout a range of businesses. A recent report by a16z offers a review of the current landscape and possible future directions. For me, the two areas of interest are applying the Web3/crypto/blockchain ideas to marketing and politics. [I have discussed these ideas in my writings on the µniverse and Bharatverse on my blog.]
A new future is coming with the collision of Web3/blockchain, gamification, the creator economy and the metaverse. It will take many years to play out. Just like the Internet. Those who wrote off the Internet’s promise after the 2000 crash missed the real value creation that happened later with the rise of Google, Facebook, Netflix, Apple’s iPhone, AWS, SaaS and more. Something similar is playing out now. There will be many ‘crypto winters’. This is the nature of innovation. Creation and Destruction. New ideas emerge from the ones that die. If you are an entrepreneur or a CEO of a big business, pay attention to the Web3 world that is emerging. Plenty of capital and an awesome array of talent is leading the way in creating new ways for us to live, work, entertain and socialise.
