Digital: Disrupted: Building the Foundation for a Blockchain Future
December 15, 2023
In this week’s episode, Paul sits down with Alan Vey to discuss the increase in blockchain adoption around the world. Alan also shares the misconceptions businesses and IT users typically have about the technology, and what he thinks will be the next biggest trend around blockchain technology.
Digital: Disrupted is a weekly podcast sponsored by Rocket Software, in which Paul Muller dives into the unique angles of digital transformation—the human side, the industry specifics, the pros and cons, and the unknown future. Paul asks tech/business experts today’s biggest questions, from “how do you go from disrupted to disruptor?” to “how does this matter to humanity?” Subscribe to gain insight into what’s coming and how to navigate it.
About This Week’s Guest:
Alan is the Founder and CEO of Aventus, an international company that delivers blockchain as a service. He is also internationally recognized as one of the top experts in Web3 and blockchain and a Forbes 30 Under 30 winner.
Listen to the full episode here or check out some highlights below.
Paul Muller: I can't explain Web3 to anyone, and I've been doing this a while, and admittedly it's partly because I give up. Whenever I try to push on an explanation, none of it makes any sense. Can you help me understand—maybe for the first time—what Web3 is and isn't?
Alan Vey: I couldn't agree more. Even I've been confused with the way it's used. Let's look at the evolution of Web1 and Web2, and then we can drill into Web3. Web1 was reading information on the internet. Some servers were set up, and you could read that information. Web2 was being able to read that information and write it back. So, this is where we got the rise of social media and user-generated content where it was very easy for anybody to push out their own content and write content into the web. Web3 is obviously read and write, but also own. So, the ability to truly represent ownership in a natively digital context, not a digital representation of the real world, but natively digital ownership.
So, there are a bunch of properties that come with that. You must be able to represent digital scarcity in a tamper-proof manner. That is a fundamental property that defines Web3, in my opinion. To me, blockchain enables the technology. It's the infrastructure of what Web3 is. Then, their tokenization is the best product so far—whether it's crypto tokens, whether it's nonfungible tokens (NFTs), or, more interesting, an in-depth application of that tokenization.
PM: That is an incredibly crisp definition. What I like about it the most is that you went out of your way to say it's not about your head floating in space on some sort of Zuckerberg property. And I think that's where, again, I would sometimes get confused. People often conflate the virtual reality element of it with the idea of what I'll loosely describe as a modernized version of digital rights management.
AV: Often, the metaverse, virtual reality, and augmented reality get pulled into this definition of Web3. I think that's just a great, that's a useful venue through which the user experience of the internet is evolving, right? Web, in the beginning, was a mouse and a keypad. Web2 was kind of a touch phone; Web3, maybe it'll be the Metaverse or these goggles or some kind of virtual experience—but not necessarily.
