Speakers: Maximillian Gutsche & Peter C. Evans
The Ask Me Anything aimed to highlight how Web3 can solve core economic problems, what emerging patterns of innovation can be observed and how they can be applied to real-world scenarios.
Peter Evans and Maximillian Gutsche ask a number of basic questions: “How different is Web3 from Web2? Will Web3 do a better job of addressing trust issues than Web2? Will economic incentives change how platforms operate? Will we see lower transaction costs and improvements in complex coordination?”
I love the idea of coordinating millions of people to co-create, co-invest, co-develop... something and then reward everyone for even the smallest contribution, says Maximilian Gutsche.
Gutsche highlighted the characteristics of Web3. These are openness, privacy and composability. “With composability, you can combine all the building blocks of Web3, you can combine decentralized finance, with NFTs, you can combine it with the DAOs, so you have a community that invests together, so everything is an open source”. Governance is a correlation. And with “it comes to the ability to coordinate a large group of people to co-invest, govern, build, manage, organize something. Later, we’re gonna see the community, basically building housing together.”
An aspect that Evans considers relevant in regards to trustlessness and community collaboration is the necessity of it to be “architected and designed.” This is due to the fact that “we’re moving to a world in which most value is intangible. Now you can assign property rights to an intangible asset in a way that you couldn’t before, is very powerful.” But in order for it to work it has to be done by design. Another aspect that is of interest with Web3 and the opportunity it gives individuals is to monetize through property rights and “not only do you fractionalize the ownership but its decentralized and it rewards people for their effort or investment.”
We looked at some emerging patterns: what are people actually innovating with the building blocks and the tools they have? Things like community owned franchises; they’re trying to build a decentralized McDonald’s. And that basically happens in a Discord server. Crazy, right?, says Maximilian Gutsche.
The creator economy is another opportunity that Web3 is likely to expand. According to Evans, “NFT’s can be an interesting way to change the dynamic between artists and fans, and brands.” Take the example of the music industry, where “NFTs allow for fan engagement and fan rewards of the final product in just completely different ways: it increases their incentive to participate (...) It changes the ownership structure in pretty dramatic and interesting ways. In Web1 and Web2, fans got the result and got to participate, but they didn’t own it. So with the NFTs, they have the potential to monetize their participation and get a fractional share of that.”
And what about open innovation with Web3? Evans comments that it “rewards the parties in new and interesting ways. So it really changes potentially how innovation can happen in a big company. And some companies are really going to embrace this, and others are going to go slow. And so it’s going to be very interesting to see the consequences of that.”
Another trending topic that has emerged with Web3 is, as Gutsche pointed out, investment dynamics: “in Web3, like it or not, you can invest in anything and your user can be an investor at the same time, right? And this obviously can be great.”
Web3 democratizes or decentralizes the creative process. But Evans clarifies that not “just because you create something, it means you have to let everybody in. In fact, exclusivity creates an incentive for people to participate. And that’s what makes it valuable.”
Web3 is an opportunity to disrupt and break the control of the centralized platforms. You gotta wonder, though, because these guys aren’t going to just sit still, they’re going to figure out how to embrace this world. And they may embrace it faster than other companies, because they’re out there watching, says Peter Evans.
The session concluded with a question: Is Web3 going to supplant Web2? Gutsche argued that Web3 will support many new and innovative projects. Platforms will play an important role-- both NFT platforms and metaverse platforms. Business will need to build capabilities and learn to effectively navigate both worlds. It will be a long time before Web2 vanishes. “If you know both worlds, you can build some pretty cool stuff”, Gutsche concluded.
Written by: Paul Berenguer
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