3 Reasons Why the World Is Never Going Back on Crypto Blockchain is changing the world and reprogramming humanity.
By Tristan Pollock •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Most human activity is driven by economic interests. Despite advances in technology, we still all spend most of our time trying to earn a living.
But what underlies that? Some may say a culture of capitalism, and that is partly true, but capitalism results from a mixture of our current financial, legal and governance systems, with a whole lot of history thrown in. Those who own the assets are the ones who benefit the most from this system. So what if I told you that blockchain technology has now created a new system for asset ownership, one that is far more egalitarian than the previous model?
1. Crypto has gone permanently mainstream
On March 26, 2021, the sports arena currently known as American Airlines Arena and home to the Miami Heat sold its naming rights to FTX. FTX is one of the world's largest crypto companies, valued at around $18 billion and run by Sam Bankman-Fried, one of the world's wealthiest young people.
Simultaneously, many major financial institutions or technology companies have integrated crypto to some size or scale into their products, platforms, and balance sheet. Tesla to Paypal, Visa to Mastercard, Wells Fargo to Microsoft. Nearly 1/3 of Robinhood's business, as of this writing, is crypto.
Coinbase was the first crypto company listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. El Salvador made Bitcoin its national currency. China is designing its own online currency, the digital yuan. Christie's sold an art collection for $69 million on the blockchain.
Time and time again, crypto has not only found its place in mainstream society but become the most iconic, largest transaction and arguably most powerful player in a relatively short period of time.
In just over a decade (Bitcoin was founded in 2009), crypto has taken the world by storm faster than the Internet itself. We've passed the stage that crypto will fail. This mainstream adoption will only lead to further innovation and integration into the current financial system and cultural norms.
Related: 5 Things to Know Before You Invest in Cryptocurrency
2. Blockchain is growing faster than the internet
As I wrote in a previous Entrepreneur article, there is 12 times more daily value in transactions on Ethereum, the most widely used blockchain, than on Paypal. The global crypto market cap has broken $2 trillion multiple times. Only Apple and Microsoft have done that before.
Bitcoin is one of the most valuable assets in the world just behind Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google) and it's decentralized; a community product scaled through adoption (Metcalfe effects) to an $810bn market cap asset today.
A single NFT collection by the NBA called TopShots has minted millionaires. That's baseball cards on steroids. Somewhat recently, Softbank announced they led a $680m funding round in an NFT fantasy soccer game named Sorare.
PleasrDAO, one of the most notorious crypto art collector organizations and the one who purchased the original DOGE meme, is thought to be considering IRL (in real life) physical pieces. There aren't enough pages for the numbers showing the power and breadth of crypto permeating society today.
Whether that's sports, investing, art or something totally new, when blockchain builds a new industry standard, it's here to stay.
Related: How Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Can Revolutionize Businesses
3. The future of Web3 won't stop at the moon
Web3 is the manifestation of Internet 3.0 (after 1.0 as creation and Internet 2.0) with the innovation of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Decentralized finance (DeFi) is one of the most powerful drivers in the blockchain application space, offering a new way for financial institutions to transact and settle.
Institutional DeFi projects like Alkemi Network, Aave and Compound are enabling traditional financial companies to access the tools and yields of decentralized finance bridging the gap between the traditional centralized finance (CeFi) industry and the blockchain-based DeFi industry. And that's a big deal with $196 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL) in the DeFi space.
Ethereum has already proven itself as the building blocks of blockchain, but cross-chain bridges are being built by organizations like Loop Finance connecting Ethereum and up-and-coming blockchains like Terra and Solana.
Tokenized communities like Friends with Benefits are changing the face of what online communities can be by rewarding contributions with tokens, giving community members a stake in the game. This goes even deeper with product-based crypto communities, like Tally, which takes a user-owned infrastructure approach allowing the community to essentially run the show, and thus the growth engine is empowered by ownership.
Decentralized autonomous communities (DAOs) are rewiring how businesses can be structured by decentralizing all or some of the operations to the community. No longer are organizations just run by employees, but in the future world, communities come together to push mission-driven organizations forward.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens, or in other words, "unique") have rethought physical-world models of art collections, trading cards, event attendance and fundraising.
Even social impact and climate tech solutions are being facilitated via crypto with projects like Angel Protocol and Regen Network.
And the metaverse, places where people gather digitally (e.g. Decentraland or The Sandbox), is reminiscent of The Sims and Second Life in the 2000s. Fortnite hosted the largest metaverse concert with over 12 million attendees.
Often these new models are not novel, but a reinvention of previous ideas at scale in a new digital world. Web3, the next generation of the Internet, is in its infancy, like Internet 1.0 in 1995 it has kinks and bugs and doesn't always look pretty. That said, it's here to stay. Blockchain and crypto are reprogramming how we work, do business, and transform culture and society. Long live Web3. Long live the metaverse.
