Transcript for:
Never Bet Against Innovation

never bet against innovation i'm looking at some of you and i can see some of you already rolling your eyes here's another blockchain crypto guy who's going to tell me how blockchain is going to save the world and make my life so much better i actually have a little secret to share i too was a skeptic of innovation but not of blockchain but of the internet i mean this is a long time ago before the internet became ubiquitous i was a freshman in college and i remember going to the computer lab and my friend sam was sitting there staring at this green monitor that's what they were back then green monitors with little blinking cursor a green blinking cursor i sit there and watch them there's like 45 minutes that pass finally i go up to sam like sam what are you doing and he said with such enthusiasm he turns around john i am on this thing called telnet it is a protocol that allows me to send an electronic message over this thing called the internet we wait another 10-15 minutes and i'm like what's going on sam and he said well my friend is trying to figure out how to use telnet hour passes i finally say to sam sam have you ever heard of a phone sam looks in disbelief and still passionate i walk away i roll my eyes just like you did and i actually say this internet thing it's never gonna work but little did i know we're about to enter the age of web one where browser wars are gonna happen search engine wars are gonna happen information was actually getting digitized from analog and by senior year i was actually a power user in my own dorm room i was researching things on the internet so that i didn't have to go to the library and carry 30 books home and then cite and reference just one paragraph one page from each of these 30 books and then a few years later i was reminded once again now this time as a professional on wall street never bet against innovation it was the mid 90s there was a company called morgan stanley one of the most well-known firms they put out this thought leadership piece literally a hundred pages and one of the predictions on what we would be doing on the internet in about 10-15 years was watching movies on our pc remember we have just barely gone past the green screen to color screens and the pcs are about this big the monitors every smart person i knew on wall street dismissed this concept they actually mocked the piece because the math did not work back then if you're going to take a two hour movie and turn it from analog to digital it was just cost prohibitive and then if you can actually do that and you wanted to transport it through the thin pipes it would be about five hours later if there's no buffering if there was buffering you would have to start all over and if you did finally get it to your pc you better have extra disks because otherwise you turn your pc into a single usage case just for that movie never bet against innovation and the internet's continue to innovate today it's a great medium of communications that's fast and cheap as well as we are in web 2. i can text my friends via whatsapp internationally for free i can put a short form video on instagram and broadcast it to thousands of people i can even hold the town forum on reddit and discuss what i've whatever i want with my friends so what is next well i've spent the last five years of my career as an operator and as a builder as a creator what's next is web 3 and web 3 is going to be the internet of value is it an internet that is built on a network of blockchains and when this is done any asset will be issued owned and transferred easily so the real question we should all be asking is what needs to happen for the internet of value to become ubiquitous well one we need proliferation of tokenization tokenization is digitizing the right of ownership onto a decentralized blockchain and when you do this you create a unified standard to represent any disparate asset that can travel on one rail now i think in five to ten years i'm gonna make my own prediction we're gonna go into a part of web 3 that i call hyper tokenization where any asset of value anything that has an income stream or a cash flow stream associated with it will be tokenized and this is super important because right now in the world we live in everything is actually silo markets where there's a lot of friction because there's many intermediaries i'll give you an example if dave here wanted to trade stocks with me or sell me tickets to the ball game tomorrow those are obviously different assets different platforms and different intermediaries so for the stock example i would have to go schwab dave would have to go to fidelity we have to go to respective brokers who then go to the respective custodians who then go through the transfer agents only to get to the market makers that take spreads on both sides of this trade before it gets to the new york stock exchange or the nasdaq where the trade actually happens and it's not even over then it then it has to go to the dtcc where it gets registered and cleared i'm tired just talking about that and that's why today it still takes two days to settle a trade on the new york stock exchange now on that ticket example dave may be using ticketmaster and i'm on stubhub we may not even discover that there is a market for tomorrow's ball game so either i or he have to change platforms to make sure this trade happens i'm going to spare you all the details of the supply chain just trust me it's complicated it's full of friction and we're both going to pay for it so when hyper tokenization actually happens what we're going to see is great innovators who have great imagination are going to figure out ways to create new value and new ways to distribute that value things that we haven't even imagined today will happen although it's actually beginning there's a company called brave and the brave browser or the brave search engine actually blocks the tracking of your usage of the internet you actually keep your privacy and you get to own your own digital data it gives you the option to actually opt in for monetization so if you decide to monetize your own data you get paid directly from the advertiser via a basic attention token now did you guys ever think two years ago you can turn your searching history into an asset that has value probably not but the benefits of web3 are not just for the users it's for the creators as well there's a company called audios audience is backed by katy perry chain smokers and a few well-known vcs now an audience for those of you who don't know it's basically the spotify of web3 so these artists now can actually post their songs on the platform the listeners or the users can buy audio tokens and with these audio tokens they can download the songs to listen and to interact with the entertainers the entertainers now have a direct pipeline of fan engagement what's happened here is basically fan engagement has been tokenized and turned into an asset and now these entertainers are able to get far bigger pie of the revenue they create than the old way where the platform and then the intermediaries and then the labels collect the bulk now the benefits continue it's not just for creators and users for businesses as well there are blockchains like avalanche where there's instant finality instant finality is when you have instant settlement settlement and payment happen at the point of transaction at the point of sale now we already talked about how on the new york stock exchange it takes two days to settle if i wanted to send money internationally to my friend through the swift network that probably takes about five days and to the restaurant that i ate dinner at last night i paid with a credit card that merchant doesn't even get the money for 30 days and they get to pay two and a half percent of my meal for the privilege of waiting 30 days when you have instant settlement what you're doing is unlocking trap capital trap capital is effectively money in transit waiting for counterparties to validate a transaction actually happened so when in web 3 when you unlock that trap capital you're increasing the velocity of money said differently you're making money more productive definition of gdp is money supply times the velocity of money so in web 3 you're increasing the velocity of money you're actually increasing economic growth who wouldn't want to increase economic growth that's a lot i just said now let's take a step back and think about what all this means it is a world where because my kids love chain smokers and i like chain smokers i can actually go search for their next album on brave and by searching i will receive brave the basic attention tokens and then use those basic attention tokens move it to the avalanche defy ecosystem swap it for audio tokens and then use those audio tokens to pay the chain smokers to listen to that song while i'm creating economic value who doesn't want to create economic value i'm here to tell you let's bet on innovation and then let's go build the internet of value thank you