So you’ve been involved in the Australian Web3 space for a number of years, how has it evolved since you started out?
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When I started, our membership base was primarily crypto and blockchain-focused start-up businesses. There weren’t any other verticals or industries getting involved. And then we saw that undercurrent of curiosity from the big four banks and other traditional financial firms who were investing in blockchain research. Some of those projects fell over; they may have been a bit ahead of their time, but they were still looking at it.
About 18 months ago is when I really started to become shocked every time we’d get a new membership inquiry. These days we’ve got music, we’ve got supply chains, energy and carbon and water businesses, big universities developing their own courses, insurance and recruitment, accounting, IoT, and robotics and gaming. All of these verticals coming in together.
I believe each of these industries is on a 10-year innovation timeline, and at the end of it, they’re all going to be profoundly different to what they are now because blockchain is the new internet.
Now, I say blockchain, but I should probably correct myself and say distributed ledger technology (DLT) instead. Contrary to the industry’s perception, I have a different view on how long blockchain will be important. I think there will be other DLTs that surpass it.
Why do you think that?
This might get me in trouble with all the religious blockchain believers out there. Industries might decide that they don’t necessarily need a decentralised ledger, they just need a distributed ledger. It doesn’t have to be open and free.
Cryptocurrencies and decentralised blockchains may not be the future of the web.Credit:Bloomberg
What they do need, though, is speed, data transfer, and security. So that’s where I think DLTs such as directed acyclic graphs may surpass the blockchain because it just has the capabilities that blockchain doesn’t at this time.
I think…
