2021: Stakeholder Capitalism Converging with Decentralization- Powered by Cryptography

2021 has been an incredible year in many diffrent fronts, which has instilled long lasting marks in our memory.

The new year started with the continued crisis state due to COVID-19 from 2020 followed by a "not conceded election" of the highest office in the oldest democracy in the world! The strongest democracy and super power in the world witnessed riots in the nation's capital which tarnished the heritage of peaceful power transfer. The year continued with less than perfect political and governance systems around the world including United States. Many unfortunate and disappointing incidents of violence, hatred and intolerance took place around the world. For many, it felt like the world is becoming more and more divided based on ideologies!

COVID-19 stole beautiful life from millions and forced lock downs between many nations as a means to contain the pandemic spread. The humanity fought back with deep convictions on various fronts to overcome the crisis and continued the composable/building block progress in science and technology.

• A new platform of vaccines based on mRNA became reality with Pfizer/Biontech and Moderna leading the way with?a high potency and capacity for rapid development like never before! This opens up a new world of possibilities for vaccines for many killer diseases in future.
• Space travel for civilians became reality for the first time in the history! . This starts many imaginations and possibilities for interplanetary travel for the future generations.
• Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning , Autonomous Vehicles, Faster Connectivity/5G, and Augmented/Mixed Reality have been used in more and more mainstream use cases with meaningful results.

COVID-19, accelerated humanity to make some remarkable accelerated progress like mRNA based vaccine platform. It also made the world visibly divided based on ideologies with theories and opinions based on no scientific backing or data!. The work places have changed for ever with never ending debates of the future of work place!

One notable and unique technology and social building block which has been exponentially progressing despite of significant friction with regulators, autocratic governments, sectors of businesses etc. has been the Crypto Tech Movement.

"Decentralize Everything" is the future, which is slowly being composed incrementally with the blockchain technology over the years and 2021 definitely shows an accelerated momentum.

The internet has hyperconnected the world with no boarders. The web 1.0 provided a way to share content for read and web 2.0 enhanced and created an interactive content creation on internet. Web 3.0 is being imagined and foundations are being built already to transfer economic value and ownership over internet with no trusted central third parties with the decentralized platforms and tokens based on cryptographic technologies. The ability to mint both fungible tokens(FT) and non fungible tokens(NFT) with integrated smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations(DAO) make this reality technically possible.

While technology is already there, this is a significant disruptor building block technology for a variety of industries as entrepreneurs start re-imagining every business workflow which exists today in the market.

Defi (decentralized finance) is already making significant inroads, despite of huge friction and push back from regulators , governments and banking industry. No one know how long it takes before we get to the point of disruption which will drive a tectonic shift in the financial industry.

• Imagine a world of cryptographically guaranteed social media platforms which can be trusted and driven by democratic principles, How about a DAO automatically moderate content for authenticity with no "fake news and alternate reality"
• Imagine a world of content platforms which shares and distribute content for economic value, being transitioned to a peer to peer model with no central party to manage. This enable the right proportionate economic incentive sharing based on the merit of the content themselves to content creators.

Imagine the "service everything world" we live in transition to a "peer to peer based service everything world", from transportation to handyman services where everything is driven by decentralized platforms and token transactions.

The world is beginning to make progress towards Stakeholder Capitalism, ESG(Environment, Social and Governance) with cryptographic platforms, DAO's and tokens. Cryptography and blockchain technologies offer a set of composable building blocks to realize these progress in a scalable way across boarders and enables a "Decentralized Governance". I believe the current decade will perhaps witness an acceleration in disruptions in many sectors driven by these technology building blocks.

As always, there will be winners and losers! Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 created many trillion dollar companies and web 3.0 will create many more, but perhaps with more adherence and practice to stakeholder capitalism and community driven governance!