2024 will see the world embracing crypto, and it will impact everybody
Maarten Ectors
Innovative Technologist, Business Strategist and Senior Executive | Bridging Technology & Business for Lasting Impact
Elon Musk just told the world he expects the X app to become your banking equivalent before the end of 2024. Telegram and Paypal are already supporting crypto payments. The US SEC has around 10 applications to approve Bitcoin electronically traded funds or ETFs. One of them from the world’s biggest investment manager, i.e. Blackrock. The EU has approved its own crypto assets regulation, i.e. MiCA.?
What we will see however in 2024 will go a lot further. Let me first explain some new concepts.?
The blockchain is a series of blocks of transactions which get chained together via cryptography. Each transaction can represent information like money (in the form of crypto tokens) being moved from one wallet to another. Everybody can see all transactions that ever happened.
Crypto are tokens. They can be totally useless or represent a dollar in a bank account for each token, i.e. stablecoin.
Tokenisation allows real world assets to be represented by crypto tokens. These assets can be money in a bank, houses but also flight tickets, company stock, insurance risk, pension funds, green energy, carbon offsetting, telecom 5G spectrum, … If you own a token, you own (a fraction of) the real world asset.
Web3, the term for blockchain and crypto enabled businesses, extends beyond moving crypto tokens from one wallet to another. Being able to proof your identity, your company’s identity, you being over 18, you being not a resident or national from a specific banned country, you earning more than the minimum wage,… are part of decentralised identity and use both verified credentials as well as zero knowledge proof [=digitally proof you are over 18 without giving away your name, date of birth,…].
Smart contracts is code which runs on the blockchain. Each transaction of the smart contract which adds, updates or deletes get tracked on the blockchain, allowing for a publicly auditable trace.
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Now let’s bring this all together. If you are a traditional eCommerce site selling big real world assets, e.g. bulldozers, then you need a bank account, paperwork to proof ownership of the bulldozers, paperwork for the maintenance log of the bulldozer,… Somebody either buys one or zero bulldozers. You pay your bank between 1% and 3% for the online sale of that bulldozer to transfer you the money. Everything happens via emails, PDFs or papers.
Now let’s reimagine the Web3 world of online bulldozers. There can be 1,000 bulldozer tokens, each representing 1,000th part ownership. They can be traded in seconds and payment transaction costs will be around $0.00025. Sensors on the bulldozer can write information to the blockchain so you can see where the bulldozer is and if it is being used. The maintenance history can be on the blockchain. The certification of the maintainer as well. People can rent the bulldozer and pay for the actual work the bulldozer did. Owners can earn part of the rent. You can proof that you rented a bulldozer at least 20 times and always returned it without damage and as such you can get a discount. All without sharing your actual identity.
The bulldozer can be insured in real-time via the blockchain.
The road which gets created by the bulldozer and several other machinery can be tokenised and be paid for through crowdfunding. The owners of the bulldozer can have voted to allow the bulldozer to be made available for free to build the road, in exchange for a fraction of future road toll. The taxes related to the road toll are automatically deducted from the robotaxis which use the road. The permissions to build the road are on the blockchain. Generative AI created the plans for the road as well as the permission requests. Robotaxis pooled funds to pay for the road to be fixed based on potholes they discovered based on risk calculations of extra maintenance and cost of loss in revenues. You can invest in an automated crypto fund which automatically invests in bulldozer and road tokens.
This is just an example of how in a Web3 world we can get to a level of automation we have never seen before. The foundations for this revolution will be planted in 2024 because it will be the year smart contracts, stablecoins, decentralised identity,… will be adopted by a much wider audience.?
What do you think will happen with crypto and Web3 in the next three years?
I help Life Coaches break the $100K barrier with high-converting websites and automated sales funnels
1 年Maarten, great insight on blockchain's mainstream surge by 2024. It's not just a tech trend, but a game-changer for business and society. Decentralized identity and smart contracts have vast untapped potential. How can non-blockchain native businesses prepare for this shift?
Nice article. What I am hoping to see - by 2050 - is a seamless flow of discounts and rewards and points; for example, if I have say 5000 frequent flier miles and I owe $5 on a credit card I should be able to apply the 5000 frequent flier miles to the credit card. This is when we will have a more real and true economy - when all assets and their monetary value are transformable and transferrable to payment and accounting systems. The present walls and separations don't make sense because money is money whether its online or paper money or in the form of points
Founder @ Apriori Network Systems | Optical Data Protection
1 年Marten, surely agree crypto-graphics are part of the tool kits needed to protect network traffic. I also see movement now in physical layer security employing physics to prevent eavesdropping, interception in the mid-spans of the networks. So, the effort to protect data obtained at the remaining points-of-attack a hacker can intercept this message between you and me now here, will need to be scrutinized from panel to panel.