[Off-camera]
Christian, being a CEO yourself, what advice would you give to other CEOs about envisioning possibilities of Web3 for their own companies, and how should they carry their people with them into this new world?
[Christian]
Dev, if you think about what Web3 is, which is a boundary-less multiverse, and we think about companies starting in this new space, we have to think about the new role of what a company is. Think about in a traditional Web2 world, the sense of a company, it’s much more formalized. We have an entity, that is producing products or services, and has a market into which it’s selling those products and services. In a Web3 environment though, we have to think about the community first. Web3 is all about community—that’s the centerpiece, the fulcrum, the main point of Web3, where an individual will own their destiny and where companies will be invited to the conversation. So, as opposed to Web2, where you have a company that sells into a community, Web3 you have a community that invites and accepts vendors and companies into the conversation. And it’s very hard, and we see that today with traditional Web2 company, Web1, really trying to make a leap into Web3, and they’re struggling. Because besides being a technology change, it’s as much of a cultural change. We know that everything that is cultural takes 10 or more years. So the first advice that we give is keep an open mind when you’re about to start a Web3-based company. You need the community to be the starting point. Without a community, it’s pointless to do anything else. You also have to think about how humans and machines will work together, and the relationship they will have and how it will change. Humans will become much more savvy in owning their own data and using the technology needed to ensure that they will do that. And I think that we’re now in a place today where the barriers to entry are lowered enough for the mass market to really take in all this new technology but what will happen? We see that in crypto, for example, with Coinbase, made something very simple something extremely complicated. I remember when I first bought my bitcoin, back in 2012, I had to send cash in an envelope to someone in Canada, begging and hoping that I would receive the private keys—so, the way to get access to my Bitcoin, via mail. Which happened. But that obviously is not scalable so Coinbase made something so difficult and so untrustworthy, so simple and trustworthy. And so the relationship between how machines and people work is an element to consider so the ease of access and ease of use is fundamental. We can’t think of, of a world that’s powered by Web3 if Web3 is still called Web3. It will become Web3, it will become engrained to our society, the mass market, the moment that we stop calling it Web3, the moment that we’re going to stop calling it NFTs.