On July 21, 2014, two blockchain pioneers—Dan Larimer and Charles Hoskinson—launched BitUSD on the BitShares network, creating the world’s first stablecoin. Their ambitious experiment sought to solve cryptocurrency’s biggest problem: extreme volatility that made digital assets useless for everyday commerce. BitUSD failed spectacularly, losing its dollar peg in 2018, but it planted the seeds for a revolution that would reshape global finance.

Later in 2014, a project called RealCoin (later rebranded as Tether) introduced a simpler approach: backing digital tokens with actual dollar reserves held in traditional banks. Unlike BitUSD’s complex algorithmic mechanisms, Tether’s model was elegantly straightforward—one digital token for one physical dollar. Despite early controversies about reserve transparency and a $41 million regulatory fine, Tether proved the concept worked at scale.

The evolution accelerated rapidly. USD Coin launched in 2018, emphasizing regulatory compliance and audited reserves. DAI emerged as a decentralized alternative, backed by cryptocurrency collateral and governed by smart contracts. By 2020, the combined stablecoin market had grown to just $5 billion—a niche corner of the crypto ecosystem used primarily for trading.

Then everything changed.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the fragility of traditional payment systems just as blockchain infrastructure matured enough for mainstream use. Argentina’s inflation crisis, Lebanon’s banking collapse, and Nigeria’s currency devaluation drove millions toward dollar-backed stablecoins as financial lifelines. Meanwhile, corporations discovered that stablecoins could slash payment costs from 2-4% to near zero while enabling instant global settlements.

By 2024, stablecoin transfer volume hit $27.6 trillion—exceeding the combined throughput of Visa and Mastercard. The market capitalization reached $260 billion, with Tether alone commanding $154 billion and becoming the third-largest cryptocurrency. What began as experimental tokens had evolved into critical financial infrastructure processing more value than the world’s largest payment networks.

The transformation culminated on July 18, 2025, when President Trump signed the GENIUS Act—the first comprehensive federal framework for stablecoin regulation. No longer experimental or unregulated, stablecoins gained legitimacy as essential components of the American monetary system. The Federal Reserve now oversees large issuers while providing access to master accounts that enable large-scale operations. A senior Treasury official noted that stablecoin growth will have “significant impact on the dominance of the US dollar and demand for US debt.”

But this regulatory acceptance represents just the beginning. What we’re witnessing isn’t merely the maturation of a cryptocurrency category—it’s the early stages of the most fundamental transformation of money since the invention of banking itself. From failed experiments to regulated financial infrastructure in eleven years. From $5 billion to $260 billion in five years. The exponential adoption curve suggests we’re approaching an inflection point where stablecoins don’t just compete with traditional money—they replace it entirely.

Based on current technological capabilities, adoption patterns, and regulatory momentum, here are 12 predictions that will reshape global finance by 2035—transforming stablecoins from digital dollars into the foundation of a programmable money system that makes today’s banking infrastructure obsolete.

1. The $10 Trillion Explosion (Prediction #1)

The stablecoin market will explode from today’s $260 billion to over $10 trillion by 2030. Bernstein’s conservative projection of $3 trillion by 2028 will prove dramatically low as regulatory clarity accelerates institutional adoption faster than anyone expects.
The foundation is already set. The GENIUS Act, signed by Trump on July 18, 2025, establishes the regulatory framework that institutions needed. The Federal Reserve now oversees large stablecoin issuers while controlling access to the critical master accounts that enable large-scale operations. This dual role as gatekeeper and infrastructure provider positions the Fed to manage explosive growth while maintaining system stability.

Transfer volume tells the real story: $27.6 trillion in 2024, already exceeding Visa and Mastercard’s combined throughput. A senior Treasury official revealed that this growth will have “significant impact on the dominance of the US dollar and demand for US debt”—translation: stablecoins are becoming a cornerstone of American monetary policy.

By 2027, Amazon and Walmart’s branded stablecoins will turn shopping into a closed-loop financial ecosystem—cutting out banks, slashing fees, and reshaping how we pay.

2. Corporate Stablecoin Wars Begin (Prediction #2)

Amazon and Walmart will launch competing branded stablecoins by 2027, with “AMZN Coin” and “WAL Token” becoming primary payment methods for their ecosystems. These aren’t payment gimmicks—they’re strategic weapons for building closed-loop digital economies that bypass traditional banking entirely.

The economics are irresistible. Credit card fees cost Amazon billions annually at 2-4% per transaction. Stablecoin payments reduce this to near zero while enabling instant settlement, automated vendor payments, and supply chain financing through smart contracts. Amazon’s stablecoin will offer Prime rewards, automatic reordering, and loyalty programs that make traditional credit cards obsolete.

The precedent exists: World Liberty Financial already launched USD1, proving that major corporations can issue regulated stablecoins under the GENIUS Act framework. When the world’s largest retailers follow suit, the transformation accelerates exponentially.

3. The Federal Reserve’s Stablecoin Gambit (Prediction #3)

By 2029, the Federal Reserve will launch “FedCoin”—not a traditional central bank digital currency, but a regulated stablecoin that partners with private issuers to maintain dollar dominance globally. This hybrid approach preserves innovation while ensuring government oversight.

The strategy is already visible. Rather than competing with stablecoins, the Fed is positioning itself as their essential infrastructure provider. The master account access guidelines and GENIUS Act oversight authority give the Fed unprecedented control over who can operate at scale. FedCoin will become the backbone of international trade settlement, backed by the full faith and credit of the US government while maintaining blockchain programmability.

By 2032, stablecoins will make 2% transaction fees obsolete—forcing Visa and Mastercard
to evolve into blockchain infrastructure or vanish with the legacy they built.

4. Death of the Credit Card Industry (Prediction #4)

Visa and Mastercard’s business models will collapse by 2032 as stablecoin payments eliminate the need for card networks. Transaction fees will drop from 2-4% to under 0.1%, forcing traditional payment processors to reinvent themselves as stablecoin infrastructure providers or face extinction.

The writing is on the wall. Payment volume is already shifting: stablecoins processed more value in 2024 than the card networks, and the gap is widening. Smart contracts eliminate intermediaries while blockchain networks operate 24/7. When Amazon and Walmart’s stablecoins prove that merchants can avoid card fees entirely, the exodus becomes unstoppable.

Forward-thinking players are already pivoting. JPMorgan launched JPMD, a deposit token designed to function like a stablecoin but integrated with traditional banking. The survivors will be those who embrace the new infrastructure rather than fighting it.

5. Programmable Money Creates New Worlds (Prediction #5)

Smart contract-enabled stablecoins will spawn entirely new business categories by 2030: subscriptions that automatically pause when income drops, insurance that pays out instantly based on sensor data, and supply chains where payments trigger automatically upon delivery verification.

The foundation exists today. Advanced yield strategies already use stablecoins for automated arbitrage, carry trading, and liquidation harvesting. Corporate treasuries are implementing “programmable treasury” operations that automatically optimize cash positions across global subsidiaries. These early applications prove the technology works—scale is the only remaining barrier.

By 2031, stablecoin-backed mortgages will make home buying instant, automated, and bank-free—replacing months of paperwork with minutes of settlement.

6. Real Estate Goes Digital (Prediction #6)

Stablecoin-backed mortgages will become standard by 2031, with property purchases settled in minutes rather than months. Decentralized lending protocols will offer mortgages backed by stablecoin reserves, eliminating banks from residential lending and reducing homeownership costs by thousands annually.

The infrastructure is emerging. Trade finance transactions already use blockchain for instant settlement, reducing document transfer times from days to minutes. Invoice factoring now happens through smart contracts with automatic payment triggers. Real estate represents the natural evolution—the largest asset class moving to the most efficient settlement system.

7. Emerging Markets Leapfrog Everything (Prediction #7)

Countries like Nigeria, India, and Brazil will achieve 80%+ stablecoin adoption by 2030, completely bypassing traditional banking infrastructure. Local currencies will become secondary as citizens and businesses operate primarily in USD-backed stablecoins.
The trend is accelerating. In Argentina, where inflation exceeded 100% in 2022, businesses routinely convert pesos to USDC immediately after receiving payments. Lebanon saw 1,781% growth in digital wallet downloads during its currency crisis. These aren’t temporary fixes—they’re permanent shifts toward more reliable monetary systems.

The network effects become self-reinforcing. As more businesses accept stablecoins, more consumers need them. As stablecoin adoption grows, local banking becomes less relevant. Eventually, the parallel economy becomes the primary economy.

By 2028, energy markets will go digital as oil and solar reserves are tokenized into stablecoins—turning electricity and fuel into instantly tradable global currencies.

8. Energy Becomes Programmable Money (Prediction #8)

Oil, gas, and renewable energy will be routinely traded using commodity-backed stablecoins by 2028. “PetroToken” and “SolarCoin” will represent actual energy reserves, enabling instant global commodity trading and creating new financial instruments that tie energy production directly to monetary value.

The precedent exists in other sectors. Gold-backed stablecoins like PAX Gold already tokenize precious metals. The technology for commodity tokenization is proven—energy companies just need regulatory clarity and infrastructure partners. The GENIUS Act’s framework for reserve-backed stablecoins provides the legal foundation.

9. Yield Revolution Kills Savings Accounts (Prediction #9)

Traditional savings accounts paying 0.1% will become obsolete as yield-bearing stablecoins offer 3-8% returns backed by Treasury bills and DeFi protocols. Banks will be forced to offer competitive stablecoin products or watch deposits flee to crypto-native yield platforms.
The yield differential is already dramatic. While savings accounts pay essentially nothing, treasury-backed stablecoins like Ondo’s USDY offer 3.85% yields with similar risk profiles. Advanced strategies through platforms like MEV Capital generate 38%+ returns through sophisticated arbitrage and carry trading.

The shift accelerates as more sophisticated players enter. BlackRock’s BUILD fund and similar institutional products make high-yield stablecoin strategies accessible to mainstream investors. Traditional banks can’t compete with 0.1% savings rates.

By 2030, stablecoin transfers will flow effortlessly across blockchains—uniting fragmented networks into one seamless global payment layer.

10. Universal Stablecoin Standards (Prediction #10)

By 2030, sending stablecoins across different blockchains will be as easy as sending an email. Universal stablecoin standards will enable instant, costless transfers between Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin Lightning, and any future networks, creating a unified global payment system.
Cross-chain infrastructure is already developing rapidly. Major stablecoins operate on multiple networks—USDC functions on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and others. The remaining challenge is seamless interoperability without complex bridging processes. Universal standards solve this, creating a single global stablecoin ecosystem.

11. AI Agents Become Economic Players (Prediction #11)

Artificial intelligence systems will use stablecoins to conduct millions of micro-transactions autonomously by 2033, purchasing computing power, data, and services without human intervention. This “AI economy” will operate entirely on stablecoin rails, with algorithms making real-time economic decisions using programmable money.

The foundation is being built now. Smart contracts already automate complex financial operations. AI systems increasingly make autonomous decisions. Stablecoins provide the perfect intersection—programmable money that AI can use for frictionless commerce. The scale will be unprecedented as AI agents transact billions of times per day.

By 2035, big banks will stop lending and start optimizing—reinventing themselves as stablecoin custodians and DeFi yield managers in a regulated digital finance ecosystem.

12. Banks Become Stablecoin Custodians (Prediction #12)

Major banks will abandon traditional lending by 2035, transforming into regulated stablecoin custodians and yield aggregators. JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo will offer “Stablecoin Treasury Services,” earning fees by optimizing yields across DeFi protocols while providing FDIC-style insurance for institutional holdings.

The transformation is already beginning. Tether purchased $33.1 billion in US Treasuries last year—more than entire countries like Canada or Mexico. Banks see the opportunity: rather than competing with stablecoins, they can profit by providing custody, compliance, and yield optimization services.

The regulatory framework supports this evolution. The GENIUS Act requires large stablecoin issuers to work with regulated institutions. Banks have the compliance infrastructure, government relationships, and balance sheet capacity to dominate this new ecosystem.

The Transformation Timeline

2025-2027: The GENIUS Act framework solidifies corporate adoption. Amazon, Walmart, and other major retailers launch branded stablecoins. Traditional payment companies begin pivoting or dying.

2027-2030: Emerging markets achieve mass stablecoin adoption. Energy and commodity tokenization scales globally. Traditional banking deposits start fleeing to yield-bearing stablecoins.

2030-2033: Universal interoperability creates a unified global payment system. AI-driven commerce emerges at a massive scale. Programmable money enables business models impossible with traditional banking.

2033-2035: Complete payment system transformation. Traditional banking becomes obsolete except for regulated stablecoin services. The global economy operates on programmable money infrastructure.

Seizing the Transformation

These predictions aren’t science fiction—they’re the logical evolution of technologies and trends already accelerating. The companies and countries that position themselves early will dominate the next era of global finance.

For financial institutions, the choice isn’t whether to engage with stablecoins, but how quickly to build capabilities before competitors capture market share. For technology companies, building stablecoin infrastructure represents a trillion-dollar opportunity as traditional payment systems become obsolete. For policymakers, the challenge is fostering innovation while maintaining stability as money itself becomes programmable.

The stablecoin revolution isn’t coming—it’s here. President Trump’s declaration that America will become “the crypto capital of the planet” reflects recognition that the global financial system is being rebuilt from the ground up. Stablecoins provide the foundation for this new system, combining the stability of traditional currencies with the programmability and efficiency of blockchain technology.

The next decade will witness the most dramatic transformation of money since the invention of banking. Those who understand and act on these predictions will shape the future of global finance. Those who dismiss them as cryptocurrency hype will find themselves competing with room-temperature superconductors using copper wires.

The revolution has begun. The question isn’t whether these predictions will prove accurate, but whether you’ll be building the infrastructure that makes them inevitable or watching from the sidelines as the world changes around you.

I’ve always been bullish on crypto. Not necessarily as a short-term speculative investment strategy but because of its promise to accommodate many future aspects of personal finance. The industry and some of its products have had some pretty spectacular ups and downs in the past five years, but I tend to think of them as growing pains and learning experiences.

Recently, the crypto exchange FTX made a series of bad decisions that have blown up in its face, and almost instantly, it faced a run on its assets, a run it couldn’t accommodate. To be fair, FTX in the recent past, has stepped in to rescue lesser, smaller crypto organizations in similar straits, providing the liquidity these companies needed to weather their predicaments and protect their customers and investors. But in doing so, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried also put his own company at risk.

When FTX faced its own liquidity crisis due to those bailouts and some other questionable moves by its affiliated trading firm Alameda Research, FTX proved NOT to be too-big-to-fail, and saviors were nowhere to be found. Few exchanges were large enough to step in to save it. Binance, a fierce competitor of FTX, took some furtive steps in that direction but quickly backed off, realizing no doubt that they might be caught up in the same quicksand. Another exchange, OKX, declined to step in as well.

Like similar episodes in this market, the FTX tale provides lessons to build on. And one of the lessons is that there are regulatory gaps in the industry. But if these are addressed thoughtfully and correctly, the fixes can sustain this industry.

Ironically, the trigger for this whole debacle was Sam Bankman-Fried voicing a pro-regulatory stance and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao taking exception to his position. This is a feud that practically guarantees a greater regulatory presence.

Regulatory reform can be good to a point, but it’s a very slippery slope away from turning crypto into something that looks like another heavily regulated banking industry.

Achieving Regulatory Balance

If crypto is going to become an everyday commodity for the majority of people in this world, which I think is inevitable and good, it will need to step out from the shadows and into the light of day.

Too many early crypto enthusiasts basked in the counter-culture aspect of it – a wild, wild west with supposedly foolproof systems of self-policing and security based on the immutability of the blockchain. They loved being smarter than the rest of us.

While we owe a lot to these early adopters, it’s still a long way from reaching everyday widespread use. For many, it still exudes geekish interfaces and a confounding vocabulary that keep the common people away.

The mainstreaming of crypto will never happen until the public stops reading scary stories about failing exchanges, crypto crashes, paper losses in the billions of dollars, and market hyper-volatility.

The U.S. and other world governments now feel that they need to step in and assume a more active role. That may be seen as an unwelcome intrusion into the libertarian-minded entrepreneurs’ world that currently manages cryptocurrencies and exchanges and want to take us to the next level.

The Challenge of Regulating Cryptocurrency

Regulating crypto will be tricky. FTX was based in the Bahamas, so more stringent U.S. regulatory standards, had they been in place, would likely not have made a difference. Ever since the days of Swiss bank accounts, investors have sought havens in low oversight, distant international environments.

But operating inside the regulatory gaps of other countries will work against crypto in the long run. Will the average novice crypto user, the kind that needs help with their mainstream financial tools, trust their transactions and retirement savings to a financial house of cards based in the Bahamas? Not likely.

If crypto is to be an accepted retirement savings tool, for example, it has to be seen as relatively safe, over a long period of time, by the average person, not just the crypto enthusiast. When a crypto organization can demonstrate it’s subject to and complying with the laws and rules of the U.S. government, it not only provides investor assurance, it can also be a selling point.

That’s why I find it so interesting that Abra, a well-known crypto exchange and lending platform, is planning to launch the first U.S.-regulated crypto bank early in 2023.

The Crypto industry in the U.S. is already more regulated than in most other countries. The Security and Exchange Commission has taken bites at that apple based on how crypto can be considered a security in some cases. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission also is very interested in this space, given the commission’s purview of regulating futures and commodities trading.

Policymaking is messy, to begin with, especially in cases where generalist policymakers try to keep up with technical innovation. Regulators are better informed on emerging crypto applications than all but a handful of members of Congress and committee staff. That’s why, in the world of Washington, things work best when policymakers give broad policy guidance and limited authority to specialized regulators who flesh out the details, subject to oversight.

Consumer Education

We’re seeing some progress in making consumers familiar and comfortable with cryptocurrency and exchanges, thanks to campaigns and products even a boomer can understand. But we need to be even more active on that front end as well.

Our K-12 education system and curricula are falling short in a number of areas – from history to civics to economics. Today’s fifth grader is tomorrow’s consumer and investor. They need to understand their currency and investment/savings options. That includes the underpinnings of cryptocurrency – not just how the app works.

And crypto companies need to accept the fact that their industry is only as strong and legitimate as their weakest link. U.S. regulators, whether the SEC or other appropriate agencies, need to act fast so that U.S.-based crypto products and exchanges are seen as the gold standard (no irony intended!) in the world and, thus, the most attractive for users and investors.

The major players in crypto are now far too beat up to truly resist the drumbeat of regulation, as a new era of crypto is about to begin. And if regulators aren’t able to rein in riskier players in this sector, the market will – as evidenced in recent weeks.

That said, we run the risk of over-regulating and potentially killing many of the emerging technologies in this space that are now percolating to the top.

Gone are the days of static non-fungible tokens, often referred to as simple NFTs.

Next-generation use cases for NFTs are granting these blockchain-secured digital assets far more utility … and very soon, they’ll be more prevalent in our lives than ever before.

We’ve spent a lot of time addressing NFTs in recent months, documenting their impact on the world of collectibles and art, for example, that allow emerging artists to cash in quicker on their talents. NFTs have also been used to tokenize other types of real property to preserve their characteristics in an immutable format.

Now, though, in addition to “static” NFTs, we have “dynamic” NFTs or dNFTs, a new generation of NFTs that can be modified by the owner and/or updated and enhanced by means of built-in smart contracts that describe when and how the dNFT’s attributes and metadata can be automatically modified and updated to reflect new, external data and conditions.

It should be noted that given the channels for automatic or owner-initiated updates to dNFTs, they’re not expected to be as secure as static NFTs – at least initially. But let’s face it, crypto safety in the NFT space is never 100%, given human error and the presence of determined and extremely skilled hackers.

In most cases, and to preserve the integrity of the dNFT, the automated changes are based on verifiable events that are then incorporated into the metadata of the dNFT via an “oracle,” a smart, blockchain-stored contract that links the on-chain code with verifiable off-chain data.

The Upside Appeal of Dynamic NFTs

Why would anyone want to change an NFT?

Incorporating new information and data into an NFT can keep it relevant or even increase its value and utility.

Certain assets will never and probably shouldn’t ever be changed, just like adding a more expansive smile to the actual Mona Lisa would be ill-advised. And it can be argued, for example, that a person’s tokenized military record, once they’ve retired or have left the service, shouldn’t be subject to editing or updating.

But for many other categories of digital assets, and there are more of them coming into view every day, it makes sense to objectively improve certain underlying unique characteristics over time to reflect some new situation, as we’ll see in some of the future use cases suggested below.

Use Cases for dNFTs in Your World

As NFTs are tokenized in more and more settings, the value of updating them is clear. We’ve emerged from NFTs strictly being used in the context of collectibles and preservation to their application in a dynamic, changing world.

Art World

Certain aspects of an art piece can be improved without altering the primary image. Think about an NFT with the portrait of some famous person like Abraham Lincoln or Wolfgang Mozart that incorporates a background that’s constantly changing to reflect the varying seasons. Also, an artist who’s sold their NFT can modify their original work with the advanced permission of the owner via a smart contract.

Real Estate

We’ll soon have dynamic NFTs for a residential structure that incrementally records all the repairs and physical changes made to the building in real time, along with periodic increases in assessment values, all driven by smart contracts and/or the owner’s input.

When it’s time to sell the house, all of that information will be documented in one place, so the negotiations will be based on better, more complete information. The sale process can be shrunk down and will happen much quicker, possibly even bypassing title searches and assessments. New ownership of the property’s dNFT will go hand in hand with new ownership of the property itself.

Digital Identity

Passports, visas, and driver’s licenses will be digitized with a dNFT, and the personal information will be routinely updated. Our digital identity will evolve with us. As a condition for digitizing their documents as a dNFT, an issuing authority will include an immutable smart contract connected to the token that will record any sanctions or restrictions imposed by a governing authority.

Gaming

Within an augmented-reality game, as a participant reaches new levels, gains new skills, or augments their persona, these changes will be instantly recorded within the player’s dNFT based on a smart contract embedded in the game.

Sports cards

Athletes rack up accomplishments throughout their careers and even after they retire. While there may be value in preserving a static, non-changing “rookie year” NFT card, dNFT versions will continually update the player’s stats, awards, best plays, and other accomplishments earned in subsequent years.

Authors

One way authors can keep their readers on the edge of their seats and increase the writer’s exposure will be to release a book one chapter at a time through their evolving, body-of-work dNFT. They’ll offer and release their sequels through that dNFT as well.

Collaborative projects

From blueprints to management plans, dNFTs will offer a secure space for collaboration, incorporating authorized input from stakeholders as well as automated input added via secure contracts related to costs and budgets, for example.

Clearly, dNFTs won’t simply be an incremental improvement on traditional NFTs. They’ll be a game changer.

Very few things in life remain the same. Those that do can be captured and held securely in a static NFT.

But in the future, nearly all manifestations of change in our lives and in the world around us will be recorded in dNFTs, creating not only an evergreen repository of information but a history of those changes as well.

The Fundamental Vision of Web 3.0

My Take on Web 3.0

Features and Functionality of Web 3.0

Within those broad parameters, what are the specific tools and capabilities offered in the Web 3.0 environment that will change our lives the most?

Many lists have been published detailing those Web 3.0 elements and features, such as this one. They all make for very interesting reading. There’s really no right or wrong answer because, again, we’re at the start of this journey and who’s to say where we’ll be when Web 3.0 evolves into Web 4.0? More on that below.

That said, I believe the utility of Web 3.0 will be best demonstrated in the context of these 11 building blocks, many of which are in place today and will continue to be enhanced and mainstreamed.

Cryptocurrencies

This digital currency is used in decentralized transactions that exist outside of any government or other financial institution. Commerce within Web 3.0 will happen via cryptocurrency in this very democratizing financial model.

Blockchain

Fundamental blockchain technology – an unchangeable ledger of assets, records, and transactions – is the foundation for secure, interpersonal transactions of all types in Web 3.0 environments.

Smart contracts

Blockchain is the key here as well since all agreements between parties and institutions can be stored within Web 3.0 environments, bypassing outside agencies so that they’re self-enforcing and auto-fulfilling.

Artificial intelligence

In Web 3.0, computers won’t think for themselves. They’ll just be far better at accessing and processing information in all forms and from all sources so that they can predict what information is most appropriate and valuable to an individual user.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

In addition to serving as proof of originality, proof of origin, and proof of ownership, as well as functioning as monetized assets, NFTs are used as indispensable and immutable credentials that allow the holder to engage in institutions within Web 3.0.

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)

DAOs are Internet-based organizations that use Web 3.0 capabilities to bring users together around a shared financial interest or another commonly held passion or purpose. Membership is often bestowed via an NFT, and the groups are governed according to smart contracts.

Decentralized applications (dApps)

The automated elements of self-executing contracts and DAO functionality are managed through dApps – algorithms created using open-source code – that can be placed on a blockchain or another distributed ledger system.

The Metaverse

As mentioned above, many people equate the Metaverse with Web 3.0. That seems simplistic and overly generous with regard to the scope of the Metaverse. The Metaverse will be a way to experience one important element of Web 3.0 – interpersonal interaction in a virtual world. That’s a lot … but it’s only one part of Web 3.0.

Soulbound tokens

As I described recently, we’ll soon be collecting and storing elements of our personal identity and documentation of our accomplishments in soulbound tokens, a special type of non-transferrable NFT, all thanks to the capabilities of Web 3.0.

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)

Because of blockchain technology in Web 3.0, we’ll see more frequent ICOs, the initial release of new digital coin assets, as opposed to mined cryptocurrencies.

Quantum computing

Quantum computers are advancing very quickly. This new generation of smarter, intuitive computer processing gets to the right answer incredibly fast and performs all the calculations inherent in the Web 3.0 building blocks much more quickly, which will lead to more seamless, immediate experiences.

Again, these core building blocks and pillars inherent in Web 3.0 don’t “define” Web 3.0, just as the existence of social media doesn’t “define” Web 2.0.

Web 3.0 will need to be defined at a higher level – beyond characteristics and tools – to reflect the status of humankind’s relationship with technology. And in this third generation, that relationship, in the most general terms is one of empowerment.

It’s odd to hear people question whether Web 3.0 will survive or if it’s just a fad. The Internet and our personal engagement with data will always evolve. Whether it advances exactly along the lines the experts are predicting today remains to be seen. We’ll have to wait twenty years until it’s time to transition to Web 4.0 before we can truly define Web 3.0 and evaluate its success.

Web 4.0

And speaking of Web 4.0, it’s hard to fathom what the fourth generation of the Internet will look like or the new frontiers it will try to reach.

My prediction is that computing and Internet technology will continue to evolve over the next 20 years away from being a tool and more towards being a partner. The logical conclusion of that evolution is integrating our brains and technology to a point where they operate in perfect synchronicity with everything that’s happening in the Metaverse.

During the 1980s and 90s, I owned a couple of Baskin Robbins stores which were mostly cash businesses during that era. On its way to our commercial bank account, the cash got counted a minimum of seven times: during the customer transaction, at shift changes, at the end of the day, when preparing the deposit, when making the deposit, etc.

Cash is certainly not always “king,” and when you think about it, cash can seem downright archaic.

Cash is still hanging in there

Yes, cash may someday go away, and in fact, it’s already close in a few countries around the world, but there’s something to be said about cash being the only survivable form of money in the event of a disaster like a giant solar flare or WWIII.

By “cash,” I mean bills and coins – not checks or debit cards, even though they’re tied directly to cash accounts. Those, in fact, are cashless options.

In many situations, cash may still be the only option for a transaction at our favorite store. Small retailers often don’t want the hassle of accepting credit cards or paying merchant fees that accompany these transactions. Further, in a cashless society, it may be difficult to pay the neighborhood kids running their lemonade stand or throw in $10 at an impromptu pass-the-hat charity event?

Some consider society’s cashless goals to be elitist. Pre-pandemic, an estimated 7% of the U.S. population was “unbanked,” i.e., with no bank accounts and with cash as their only option for daily purchases. In addition, many people are under-banked without access to banking tools like credit cards or online payment apps.

Solutions to some of these challenges are pretty clear. In time, lemonade stand kids will utilize social media-based payment accounts. Crowdfunding apps like GoFundMe and others provide on-the-spot options to support a good cause when the impromptu giving spirit moves us. Stubborn retailers will lose out on business to the point where they’ll need to provide electronic payment options.

The challenge of the unbanked and underbanked population, though, will be the last one solved as we’ll see below.

COVID Propelled the Cashless Migration

We certainly took a huge step toward a “less-cash” system during the pandemic. In 2020 we were concerned about contact transmission of the virus from currency and coins or any surface for that matter. Much of our commerce shifted to online. Many people began making all of their in-store transactions, no matter how small, with credit or debit cards because it seemed like a safer option.

Cash transactions were still possible, but soon we started seeing posted signs at store checkouts requiring an exact change or stating it might not be possible for the cashier to provide exact change due to coinage shortages. Pocket change was stacking up in containers at home instead of being kept handy in a change purse or pocket.

If it weren’t for the desire to give well-deserved, cash-based service provider tips during this period, few of us would have carried or used any cash at all during much of 2020 and 2021.

What Will Replace Cash?

A good question to ask is, are we better off without cash? And why?

In 50 years, greenbacks and coinage may indeed be relics and collectors’ items.

Our purchases are certainly tending toward digital money – carried out in a number of forms. What each of our transactions will look like will depend on what’s in our electronic wallet (e.g., a bank account, a crypto account, or a line of credit in either of those denominations) and our preferred method of linking to our accounts (credit cards, debit cards, and online payment apps).

Cryptocurrency will be the e-currency behind an increasing number of these transactions. Crypto’s foundation in distributed ledger technology makes it extremely secure and private. As of now, we’re not quite at the point where we can pay for an ice cream cone with bitcoin, but cryptocurrency debit cards tied to a crypto account are showing great promise for e-commerce and to a growing extent for in-person retail purchases, at this time mostly for high-end items like jewelry, cars, electronics, and some services.

Crypto-based revolving lines of credit in the form of credit cards are also available and soon we’ll be at the point where the distinction between crypto- and fiat currency-based cards will be blurred and we’ll have the option to choose one or the other at the time of purchase.

Online payment apps and mobile device services, like Venmo, PayPal, Apple Pay, and others, will flourish as well. These accounts (either crypto or fiat currency-based) will continue to be tied to an increasing variety of bank accounts and credit card accounts or linked directly to balances we maintain on those apps. Venmo even adds a social media element to the transactions: Spending money with friends is fun!

What About Checks?

Checks are one of the earliest forms of cashless transactions in modern times, but their use is rapidly declining. Fewer stores accept checks these days and even fewer Gen Z’ers even know how to write them … or have had to write them! Check fraud recently is way up as well. Most of us write only a handful of checks each year – for unique circumstances and not at all for day-to-day transactions.

Still, checks, or something with a similar look and feel, will always be an option for drawing on an account of any type. There will be significant fees attached to these transactions, though, given the extra steps involved in processing these payments.

Cashless Implications on Criminal Behavior

Cash, for all of its inherent inefficiencies, has the benefit of being an anonymous facilitator of commerce. Cash transactions leave no trail except maybe a fingerprint or serial number on a $50 bill. For that reason, going cashless will be bad for the business of crime. Digital footprints are almost always trackable with enough effort, especially when the user creates a vulnerability or is targeted for hacking.

Certain aspects of law enforcement will change dramatically. Rather than patrolling or seeking informants regarding drug trafficking, for example, cyber expert police officers will be safe at their computers uncovering and tracing now-discoverable money flows. “Following the money” to uncover the crime and catch the criminal will be the daily norm.

Learning from Sweden … and what I call the 100% Certainty Conundrum

Sweden is often held up as a groundbreaking nation when it comes to going cashless. Remarkably, only 1% of the country’s GDP is held in cash, compared to 8% in the U.S. Swedish retailers are allowed to refuse cash for purchases and the country is exploring developing an electronic version of their national currency (e-krona), which is a 1:1 equivalent of the cash version of their krona.

It’s important to know, that the e-krona isn’t a cryptocurrency and it’s not blockchain-based. Citizens can hold their e-krona on a card or in an app.

Recently, though, the seemingly inevitable shift to going completely cashless in Sweden is becoming significantly less inevitable. Like any kind of “all-or-nothing” technology transition, utopia inevitably meets reality, in this case, the unbanked and underbanked, who make up the last few percent of users.

The 100% Certainty Conundrum creates gates to the future in a number of ways. We see it, for example, in the “need” for 100% safety when it comes to self-driving car technology. We may be 99% there, but the technology won’t be fully embraced until that elusive 1% is accounted for (even though human-driver safety rates will never achieve that 100% standard).

In the case of Sweden’s and any other country’s cashless utopia, it won’t happen until we can achieve 100% usability and acceptance of a combination of e-currency and other cashless options. The issue of the unbanked and underbanked, the last 1-2% of the population, must be solved before any government will dare enforce a cash-free system of national commerce.

Keep in mind, that solving the equation for the final 1% becomes exponentially more difficult as we approach zero.

And the onus for a cashless economic system is truly on the government. In the U.S., some small retailers have gotten too far out ahead of the curve on going cash-free and ended up having to reverse course in the face of disgruntled customers and lost sales. Some states and major cities, in fact, have passed laws prohibiting businesses from operating cash-free, citing the concerns of unbanked and underbanked citizens.

For those people who don’t trust banks, and that becomes a much greater percentage during a recession, having cash stocked away in a secret place at home, is a comforting form of security.

For now, that means that in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and other countries, the best we can hope for is going mostly cash-free.

Does that mean we’ll never go completely cash-free? Perhaps! Progress comes in fits, starts, and occasional backward steps. If nothing else, progress is virtually always messy.

In 2015, I wrote a column, “Going Beyond Micro-Payments to Nano-Payments” where I talked through some of the possible uses for tiny micropayments far smaller than anything possible today. Like others, I assumed blockchain technology would be the key to getting the transaction costs low enough to support micropayments as low as fractions of a penny.

Micropayments are indeed on the horizon but we’re getting there with a slightly different route than many envisioned. The need is more evident than ever, though.

How often have you clicked a link to an article in a premier journal that seemed like it could be interesting, only to be informed that you’ve run out of “free views” of the articles from that journal? Your only option to read the piece is to agree to their trial offer. If it’s not worth the time, hassle, or future subscription costs, you’ll move on.

But a one-time, digital micropayment of 3 cents, processed through a Blockchain crypto account could give you access to that article and compensate the publisher 2 cents, with 1 cent covering the transaction fee. A win-win solution.

The Cost of Transactions

Early cryptocurrency enthusiasts were optimistic about the possibility of making these kinds of near-zero-cost transactions using the Bitcoin blockchain. They were confident that blockchain technology would not only enable secure transactions but would allow for cost-effective processing of extremely small-value transactions – micropayments – for purchasing goods and services in minute amounts.

These early micropayment enthusiasts were almost right. We’re not there yet, though, because the cost of a Bitcoin transaction is now almost $2.00, although it’s been as low as 5 cents in the recent past.

Continuing with that example from above, no publisher, of course, will pay $2 to collect 2 cents, so for now, they’ll continue to lure us with introductory offers they’re hoping will transition us into long-term, full-price subscribers. News services will continue to bundle the offerings of multiple publishers and charge a monthly fee that’s anything but “micro.”

So, if high blockchain transaction fees are precluding micropayments, what’s the alternative? As it turns out, some newer distributed ledger technologies have far lower transaction fees and could even get us to the point of fee-less transactions.

How could that change our lives? Here are just a few examples.

Access to Content

This kind of micropayment system will give us each the opportunity to purchase small experiences and items we wouldn’t otherwise be able to buy – a single journal article for example.

On the other hand, it might also require us to buy something that previously we had access to for free – a limited number of articles in Fortune for example or access to video clips we currently only “purchase” with our time as we wait for the chance to bypass the commercial that precedes it.

But soon we’ll have the opportunity to have ad-free, full access, online experiences no matter what newspaper or journal we click on. Research, browsing, learning, and growing will be easier than ever.

In fact, there’ll be so many content micropayments in this area of our daily lives that the situation could become a nuisance if it’s not handled well. For some, the time cost of authorizing numerous micropayments could outweigh the value as we endlessly click “Approve.” To get around this, we’ll enable broad levels of approvals, so our content consumption can be seamless with no interruptions – either for ads or for authorizations.

and read … not and read. It makes a difference

Incentivizing Ethics and Morality

As a society, we’ve become very focused on punishing people for bad behavior, but we’re still pretty inept at incentivizing them for doing something good. Unfortunately, peer pressure and societal norms aren’t enough to keep us in line, let alone convince us to be noble and gracious. But if we knew we were receiving micropayments for doing the right thing, we might go about our days in a slightly different manner.

Lots of details would need to be worked out, of course. Who would define good behavior and the amount of cryptocurrency rewarded for that act? How would the behavior be monitored if it’s not happening online? Who would assign the reward or penalty for each deed?

In a metaverse, every step we take and each encounter we have can be monitored and logged to be rewarded or punished with a micropayment receipt or deduction.

But I don’t see people accepting that kind of intrusion in the physical world. What kind of Big Brother system would we have to have that records each time we opened a door for someone, wished a stranger “Good Morning,” bagged our own groceries, or took the time to perform any other social nicety that would make someone else’s day a little better?

Initially, then, we would need to limit this micropayment reward system to things that are verifiable by a third party, ideally online (e.g., voting, filing a tax return, making a charitable contribution, earning an “A,” etc.).

But that’s a good starting point.

Turning Consumers into Prosumers

A “prosumer” is a person who both consumes and produces items. Outside of our jobs, we all produce items of value in our everyday lives – but few of us are paid or somehow rewarded for them.

• Marketers capture our browsing and clicking records to better understand our preferences and commercial trends in general.
• Sensor data from smart cars provides information to city planners and others about traffic and road conditions.
• Data that are generated by the Internet of Things (IoT) appliances and systems in our homes is used by manufacturers to design and make even better IoT-enabled appliances and systems.
• Our health data has tremendous value that’s not being used by anyone except our own caregivers, even though it could be very useful for medical researchers.

If someone has nothing to hide in these and similar areas, why shouldn’t they have the option to sell this self-generated data to those who want it and can use it for good or at least for no harm? The value these institutions place on each separate small glimpse into our lives is minuscule, to be sure, but the value of the sum of those glimpses is potentially large.

It’s a perfect job for a micropayment system.

What if we paid a tenth of a cent for every “like” given to a post on social media, and we receive a similar tenth of a send for when someone “liked” one of our posts?

What if we charged the public a tenth of a cent for every email we received and paid a tenth of a cent for every email we sent out? The number of spam emails we received would drop off precipitously.

The number and types of startup businesses that would be created would be breathtaking!

The Bottom Line

A macro system of micropayments will be transformational to our world.

It will give businesses better information to evaluate their goods and services. It will provide more diverse data for health researchers. It will better reward artists and other content producers. It will empower each of us to have the option to benefit from the value we generate automatically in the course of our everyday lives. And we’ll all have the opportunity to be better informed and hopefully even newly exposed to ideas and thoughts we wouldn’t otherwise encounter.

A few days ago, I was listening to episode 597 of the Bad Crypto Podcast and it was rather insightful listening to how Joel Comm and his co-host Travis Wright randomly picked cryptocurrencies from listings on CoinGecko and evaluated them on the spot using a variety of techniques and standards.

With just a cursory glance at key data points, they assessed the cryptocurrency’s market cap, years in business, professionalism of the website, underlying business model, blockchain capabilities, leadership team, major engagers, and historic fluctuation. It’s a lot of data, and once combined, can tell a pretty good story about the coin’s past and future.

The last I checked there were 13,660 different coins listed on CoinGecko, and from a newbie’s perspective it’s incredibly challenging to weed through the hype and make sense out of everything that’s taking place.

Before I continue, let me make it clear; nothing in this article is to be taken as financial advice. I am simply stating my observations and experiences. Past performance is not a guarantee of future return, nor is it indicative of future performance. Investing involves risk and the investment will fluctuate over time, and you may gain or lose money. As with all financial decisions, you should consult a licensed professional.

What’s Different About Crypto?

Cryptocurrency is the next evolution of currency and mediums of exchange in our world. We’ve already progressed from barter systems to tradeable certificates of value, to printed notes, to currency that’s based on the full faith and credit of governments, and to electronic manifestations of these notes and currencies.

What’s different about cryptocurrencies of course is they represent the privatization of currency, and thus they often struggle to compete with traditional government-backed currency in the everyday kinds of commerce. It’s not easy to transition a global or even a nation-state’s economy and commerce from a traditional national or regional currency to cryptocurrency, which has been very apparent in El Salvador.

That’s why cryptocurrencies still only fill a relatively tiny niche. But still only being a tiny niche is because of many more things than just that. They are still too geeky, too complicated, too hackable, too confusing, and too risky for the average person on the street. In short, they’re not user-friendly.

From a usability standpoint, cash is easy to understand. The denominations are clearly printed on the bills, it’s widely accepted, you don’t need a device like a phone or a computer to work with it, and even a third-grader can understand the basic elements of a transaction. But the crypto universe has a long way to go to make its coins and tokens as stupidly simple as cash.

For example, most first-time users have conventional payment systems in mind when making a transaction, similar to online banking. They instantly assume transactions have fixed fees, are reversible, and can easily be canceled, none of which are true in reality.

Most are confused about the terminology and the fundamental building blocks of crypto, including blockchain, public-key cryptography, recovery mechanisms, how to perform a transaction, and even the role of a wallet.

So far, crypto has managed to carve out a niche as an alternative investment asset. They can also be used for metaverse-based commerce (e.g., for NFTs), smart contracts, and DeFi engagement. Some retailers in the physical world are willing to accept them, but usually, as a way to enhance their brand or to entice a specific customer demographic. Outside of the metaverse, our economies still need both options.

Why So Many?

We’re still in the early days of cryptocurrency, and there’s a lot of weeding out that will happen. Cryptocurrencies are plentiful because they’re new, trendy, easy to create, and relatively unregulated – especially at the global level.

It’s also important to note that there are many different categories or types of cryptocurrencies.

For example, some are intended to serve as a global currency for mainstream transactions and investments. Within that category, we also have stablecoins, cryptocurrencies that are tied to a fixed asset (like a national currency or a commodity), which theoretically protects them and their holders from extreme price fluctuations.

Other cryptocurrencies are “project tokens” tied to specific DeFi platforms to provide ownership stakes and as a tool for governance within those spaces.

Still, others are considered “meme coins,” designed and marketed as trendy, serving primarily as speculative investments.

Moving forward, all of these types of cryptocurrencies will continue to be offered, but many individual ones will fail, putting a damper on the impulse to start new ones.

How to Choose

Here are some of the common approaches people will use to evaluate a cryptocurrency, regardless of the category:

1. Check the market listing and review data points such as Project Ranking, Market Cap, Price History, Trading Volume, Liquidity, Circulation Supply, Total Supply, Today’s Price.
2. Visit the Website for information about who’s on the Team (founders, executives, developers, partners, advisors), Roadmap, Vision, Investors, and Tokenomics.
3. Assess the cryptocurrency’s White Paper and review its information related to Objectives, Details on open-source code, Target Demographic, Roadmap, Tokenomics, and Distribution Scheme.
4. Review the cryptocurrency’s social media profiles and commentary (especially on Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, and LinkedIn) to get a feel for the experience.
5. Understand the utility and use case.
6. Check for scam alerts.
7. Assess the competing cryptocurrencies in that space.

Learning from History

In fact, roughly 1,000 cryptocurrencies have failed or were ended by their owners, including OneCoin, BitConnect, GetGems, SpaceBIT, and The DAO.

Why did they fail? Some were publicity stunts. Others were the victim of unregulated, Wild West markets at their worst, with massive fluctuations that caused investors to lose confidence. Others were mismanaged, and still, others were done in by hacker thieves. 

The breathtaking fluctuations in the significant global cryptocurrencies seem to be getting more under control and are less concerning to investors. But some experts say that a broader economic crash, possibly due to geopolitical events, could bring many more of them down. At this time, 75 cryptocurrencies are worth more than $1 billion.

How Many Cryptocurrencies Do We Need? 

In the future, we’ll need as many types of cryptocurrencies as it takes to satisfy all the purposes for cryptocurrencies, and we’re still a long way from all of the potential uses. For example, some cryptos may carve out a unique niche for specialty insurance, financing land on Mars, or funding eldercare, medical tourism, childcare, or barter networks.

Additionally, we should expect limited-time business-specific cryptos to fund startups during their initial growth phases.

We will also see a number of cryptocurrencies that will both complement and replace national currencies. These will be designed to support specific geographical constituencies. 

Token-based cryptocurrencies will continue to be developed to match metaverse and other DeFi experiences, the number of which will naturally consolidate over time reflecting normal market forces. 

There will always be room for meme-type, hyper-speculative cryptocurrencies offered in an appropriately regulated environment.

To the extent that stablecoins are tied to a national hard currency, they’ll be offered primarily as investment options. Those that are based on a global commodity, for example, gold or possibly a globally accepted national currency like the Euro or U.S. Dollar, might serve as a (not “the”) global currency.

And in the last category, the truly global cryptocurrencies are used for investment and for international commerce. In all likelihood, we’ll see just 3-4 win out in the end. 

Keep in mind, that today’s use of widely accepted credit cards emerged in the 1950s, and today consumers and market forces have caused us to settle on just a handful of companies – Visa, Mastercard, Discover, AmEx, etc. The same will happen with global transactional cryptocurrency options. The strongest global cryptocurrencies will squeeze out the rest as merchants choose which ones to accept.

Lately Bitcoin and the blockchain have been occupying more and more of my attention and I recently found myself watching Andreas Antonopoulos’s excellent talk “Introduction to Bitcoin: what is bitcoin and why does it matter?”.

It does such a terrific job of encapsulating Bitcoin’s transformative potential and I wanted to translate this into some likely futurist scenarios in the years ahead.

Andreas has become a world-famous advocate of Bitcoin-related technologies, and he’s published five books on the subject, but it took time for him to become convinced enough to turn his obsession and advocacy into his vocation.

His experience followed a now-familiar two-part process. First, he dismissed Bitcoin as “nerd money” for gamblers and drug dealers. Then he grasped its potential and became completely obsessed with it.

What makes Bitcoin so captivating? It’s much, much more than what it appears to be.

Bitcoin is not a traditional currency, or a company, or a product. Rather, it’s a platform of trust.

All forms of currency are based on trust. Not just those that are commonly referred to as fiat money, which means “trust,” but absolutely every form of currency is based on some level of trust.

Phrased more philosophically, Bitcoin is the concept of decentralization applied to the exchange of value.

To get our minds wrapped around this idea, it helps to take a step back and ask, “what is money?”

What is money?

A common economic definition of money is “any good or asset that is accepted on one side of every exchange”.

If I’m buying something, the seller will almost always accept money. And if I’m selling something, I will almost always accept money.

This characteristic of money means that simply possessing it lets you purchase a near-infinite variety of goods, services, and experiences.

Money itself typically isn’t valuable, though commodity money like gold might have industrial uses. But since money is tradable for things that are worthwhile, such as the goods or services we actually want to purchase, it opens up whole new opportunities for specialization, trade, and mutual profit.

If you don’t find this point fully convincing, consult the first few chapters of any introductory economic textbook. Economics 101 almost always has a setting-the-stage section talking about all the ways in which money is superior to barter.

For most people it’s difficult to grasp all the nuances of money because it’s one of the oldest technologies in existence, so deeply embedded in our lives that we take it for granted.

However, today’s monetary systems are old and tired, with so many patches in place that even the patches have patches.

Why is decentralized money potentially revolutionary?

Over its long history, the human race has had to struggle through five major paradigm shifts in money:

1. The emergence of barter
2. The first abstractions of value (e.g., shells and beads)
3. The move to metallic monies, like gold and silver
4. The move to paper fiat money
5. The move to plastic money (e.g., credit cards)

Andreas maintains that the 6th revolution in money started with the introduction of #Bitcoin and the creation of the first network money.

Like the Internet, the Bitcoin blockchain is completely decentralized and allows for currency to run as an application.

Approaching it from another perspective, Bitcoin isn’t “money for the Internet,” it’s the “Internet of money.”

This line of thinking is more than a clever soundbite; it’s a profound truth that gets at the heart of why so many people are excited about this space.

What the decentralized properties of the Internet made possible for communication, the decentralized properties of the blockchain make possible for money.

Bitcoin has emerged as the first open, global currency not beholden to any nation state, institution, or central authority.

It is also programmable. Anyone can write applications on top of it and launch them, without asking permission from gatekeepers.

Why do decentralization and programmability matter?

Decentralization and programmability are the same attributes or characteristics that have made the open-source movement so exponentially innovative. From out of the late-night musings and buzzing of programmers that contributed to the confusion of that community have emerged staggering examples of emergent order that has irrevocably changed the world, almost always for the better.

Tons of software, including most of the code powering your computer, your access to the Internet, and even the pixels displaying on your screen right now, was written by decentralized open-source communities.

And now, there’s a monetary system that can be used and modified in the same way.

Putting it all together, we have:

1. An ancient technology (money) that forms part of the core stack that civilization is running on.
2. The first protocol which allows for experimenting with that technology at the scale and speed of open-source software.

From this vantage point, you don’t need much imagination to see the potential.

What’s the future of Bitcoin?

Of course, we’re still in the very early days of the blockchain and trying to predict where it’ll be in fifty years is like trying to foresee the emergence of Amazon from the crude Internet of 1975.

Still, there are indications, and as the co-host of the Futurati Podcast noted, we are being exposed to a variety of insightful glimpses of what’s in the pipeline.

The decentralized, anonymized nature of the major cryptocurrencies will prevail.

Many people, especially in the older generation, will remain confused by cryptocurrency. They’ll stick to national currencies, giving traditional banking a bit of staying power. Increasingly, though, these people will miss out on investment opportunities and efficient financial services.

It may become harder and harder for them to find retailers that accept their dollar-based credit cards without adding a surcharge.

At the same time, cryptocurrencies are seen as “geeky,” and it will take a serious upgrade to their user interfaces for them to reach mass adoption.

Speaking with noted crypto-evangelist Joel Comm, he helped us understand the possibilities of using non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to store documents like property deeds and driver’s licenses. This could substantially reduce the red tape involved in many routine activities while reducing the likelihood of fraud and legal disputes.

Corey Hoffstein, of Newfound Research, talked to us about the burgeoning market for NFTs and the challenges of applying traditional financial concepts to the crypto asset ecosystem.

And of course, famed Bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack had a lot to say about the double spending problem, Bitcoin versus gold, and Bitcoin versus every other major cryptocurrency.

There are going to be a number of monumental new experiments with this technology, and I’m thrilled to be here to see them happen.

We’re seeing new opportunities to create monetary value based on blockchain and cyber currency. Crypto mining is one way, of course, as “miners” stack computers to create block equations that are verified and confirmed, adding to the blockchain and the assets of the miners.

More recently we’ve seen the rise of NFTs, non-fungible tokens. As we’ve explored previously, these are digital representations of assets whose uniqueness imparts value and is ensured by blockchain technology.

The newest wealth-creating, blockchain-enabled wealth opportunity is the play-to-earn (P2E) phenomenon, where multiplayer gamers can earn money (cryptocurrency) and create valuable assets (NFTs) simply by playing these games. Previous versions of online multiplayer games offered points or even pseudo-currencies. But credits for lands conquered or warriors created had to stay within the confines of the game due to restrictive Terms of Service Agreements.

Much of that is changing with P2E. The multiplayer games are getting bigger and more complex, drifting into the metaverse. Some games evolve based on the actions of the users and there are fewer rules and restrictions. Not surprisingly, players are no longer satisfied with trekking around new kingdoms or galaxies or engaging in battle royales simply for the sake of recognition, self-satisfaction, or bragging rights.

Today’s multiplayer gamers want tangible rewards they can take into the “real world.” Now they have it. With P2E, the points or currency they earn in the games can be “cashed out” in the form of cryptocurrency. And the assets the gamers develop can be transformed into NFTs and then bought, sold, traded, or donated in cryptocurrency-based marketplaces and exchanges.

Two Ways to Earn

Just playing (and even better, winning) can earn someone several hundred or more dollars a month in crypto equivalents. That makes P2E a side job or a hobby in western countries. But for players in less-developed areas – Vietnam and the Philippines, for example – it can be a basic source of income.

And all bets are off for the profitability of game-based NFT deals. These sales can bring in far more – thousands of dollars even – as long as there’s a willing buyer. That’s the catch. Markets don’t go up forever. The last person holding a specific NFT who can’t find a buyer essentially is holding a token valued only for its aesthetics.

The P2E Games People Play

The market cap for gaming is projected to be $178 billion in 2021 and it’s expected to surpass $295 billion over the next five years. PlayToEarn.net currently lists hundreds of gaming sites that allow players to earn money gaming.

By far the most popular P2E game is Axie Infinity. Almost two million players have purchased, raised, sold, and even gone to battle with their Axie digital pet tokens. Players can earn the game’s “smooth love potion” (SLP) cryptocurrency for their efforts and success, as well as sell their Axie NFTs for even bigger returns. The game was launched in 2018 and as of August of this year, it had reached a sales volume of $845 million and logged 3.8 million transactions.

Other P2E games are equally imaginative.

Blankos Block Party is especially popular with kids (more on that later) as they develop and market their user-created toys that exist in a cartoon-like world. The game is expected to attract a million users before long, due in large part to the fact that all the blockchain and cyber currency aspects are hidden behind the scenes making it appear more like a typical multiplayer game.

Similarly, there’s Lightnite, which will be released shortly. This is a groundbreaking P2E alternative since gamers can also lose money if they don’t succeed in their multiplayer combat encounters.

One last P2E game we’ll mention is The Sandbox, which is somewhat unique if only for the big-name investors that are backing it. The game is in beta right now, but already, before the widely played alpha version has even started, eager players have already invested in the game’s currency, with market capitalization standing at around $700 million.

An After School Job?

Multiplayer, metaverse gaming has always rewarded skills like perseverance, critical thinking, strategic planning, artistic creation, and others – admirable lessons, for sure. The new, P2E aspect of these activities will be also cited by shrewd, young teens to justify the hours at a time they’d like to spend in these worlds. They may have a point. P2E can certainly be a crash course for them to learn about the working, entrepreneurial world.

As with many things, though, every parent or guardian will have to decide for their family if P2E is appropriate and whether and how to set boundaries. In doing so, they’ll need to consider the fact that certain elements of P2E are safer or less safe than others for pre-adults.

They’ll need to take the time to realize there’s a difference between:

• Earning a hundred dollars a week in cryptocurrency by shrewdly maneuvering through a metaverse.
• Selling a well-conceived, personally designed  NFT toy image on the P2E game’s exchange for $250 in cryptocurrency.
• Storing all P2E earnings in relatively unstable cryptocurrency accounts.
• Buying an NFT for $500 because it looks cool and might be flipped for $1,000 next month.
• Engaging in a P2E game where players might also lose money (aka gambling).

Moving forward, we’ll see more self-imposed or outside regulation of P2E platforms. Already, for example, Axie Infinity is only open to players 18 and older, and while Blankos Block Party allows 13-year-olds to play, they must be 18 or older to cash out.

Parental Warning

And for their part, parents will increasingly be forced to understand the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Unfortunately, too many have their heads in the sand, hoping/assuming this will all go away. It won’t. They don’t have this luxury of denial anymore.

P2E will thrive as long as cryptocurrencies remain viable. Blockchain-based currencies have evolved too far to be legislated out of existence. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies inevitably will be part of their children’s lives moving forward, so Gen Xers and Boomers had better do their homework and due diligence.

The metaverse is the collective assortment of byte-based alternatives to features of the physical, atomized world. The metaverse is in our future with or without our permission. We’ve taken too many steps in that direction already to stop it.

And as we noted just a few weeks ago, while many people think of the metaverse as some version of the dystopian movie, Ready Player One, the bulk of the metaverse will have far more utilitarian value.

To understand where all of this is headed, it’s instructive to look back and put in context the significant steps we’ve already taken down the virtual metaverse road.

History and future are one continuum with no beginning or endpoints. At any given time, we can see how today’s breakthroughs and future trends are building on top of the framework of previous discoveries. Whether we knew it at the time, the historical steps I’ll lay out below were critical in the formation and future of the metaverse. It’s very clear in hindsight.

So, let’s look back 40 years or so to get a fresh perspective on this metaverse trajectory. I selected 1991 as a beginning point, the advent of the internet. But we could just as easily establish a similar timeline that leads up to that important breakthrough, too.

Why are these milestones considered elemental to the emergence of the metaverse? Each one adds an element of structure, capability, and, yes, reality within that virtual, parallel world – a metaverse many would consider safer and more democratic than our physical universe.

Brief History of the Metaverse

1991 – Birth of the Internet

On the 6th of August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted the very first public invitation for collaboration on the WorldWideWeb. This is the date the Internet was born.

1992 – Snow Crash

The very next year, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world.

1993 – Proof of Work

The term and concept were introduced in the context of computer security as a way to prevent email spamming. Later, proof work became one of the primary techniques for verifying and legitimizing transactions on a blockchain, specifically – cyber currency mining based on computer power.

1998 – B-Money

Computer engineer Wei Dei revealed his concept for b-money, a decentralized, distributed cryptocurrency. It never came to pass but some of the concepts are very similar to those in Bitcoin, which emerged years later. One element was the use of Proof of Stake, an alternative mining algorithm that relies on the developer’s current holdings of the cryptocurrency rather than raw computing power.

2002 – Digital Twins

The concept and model of the digital twin – the digital counterpart of a physical object – was publicly introduced in 2002 by Michael Grieves, then of the University of Michigan, at a Society of Manufacturing Engineers conference. Grieves proposed the digital twin as the conceptual model underlying product lifecycle management.

2003 – Second Life

Second Life is the online virtual world, developed by Philip Rosedale and his team at Linden Lab in 2003. It was very much a precursor to the Metaverse worlds being developed today. One of the biggest problems Second Life users faced was low bandwidths and high “res” times making it a less-than-optimal experience. But even today, Second Life has an active user base of a million people, each spending over four hours a day in this virtual world.

2006 – Roblox

This online platform was introduced that allowed users to create and play games developed by other users. During the 2020 pandemic, it became a significant source of interaction for young people, and it became the third-highest-grossing game that year.

2009 – Bitcoin

On the 3rd of January in 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence with its mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, mining the genesis block of bitcoin (block number 0), which yielded a reward of 50 bitcoins. This was the day Bitcoin was born.

2009 – Blockchain

Along with the invention of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto also invented blockchain to serve as the public transaction ledger for Bitcoin. Even though others have claimed to have invented the concept of blockchain earlier, the same day that Bitcoin was launched is the same day that a usable form of Blockchain was born.

2010 – Play-to-Earn Technology

Gacha games had grown popular in Japan by the early 2010s, based on the capsule toy vending machine concept, with the earliest known system being in MapleStory. Players would earn currency that they could use to participate in a random draw from a set of items based on pre-determined rarities, often with the goal to collect all of a one set of items to gain a powerful in-game reward.

2011 – Ready Player One

This novel by Ernest Cline introduced many young people to the concept of a virtual reality world. The Steven Spielberg adaptation in 2018 made the idea even more vivid and the interest more widespread.

2012 – NFTs

An NFT or “Nifty” is a Non-Fungible Token, representing a unique item instead of fungible tokens, which are mutually interchangeable, such as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The concept of NFTs has been with us since December 2012 with the creation of “Colored Coins,” in which additional information is incorporated onto a bitcoin so that it is no longer fungible but unique. This, interestingly enough, was a project spearheaded by a young Vitalik Buterin as he worked on improvements for the Bitcoin blockchain.

2014 – Vitalik Buterin

The Thiel Fellowship – In 1999, Peter Thiel’s company Confinity merged with Elon Musk’s company X.com to form PayPal. Three years later, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, making both Musk and Thiel very wealthy. In 2010, Peter Thiel announced the formation of the Thiel Fellowship, offering $100,000 grants for students under the age of 22 to leave school and pursue other work. In 2014, one of the recipients of this grant was 20-year-old Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum.

2015 – Ethereum

In July of 2015, Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood launched the Ethereum Network, along with the ethereum blockchain.

2015 – Decentraland

The first iteration of this virtual reality platform was introduced in 2015. It allocated “land” via a proof of work algorithm. The 2021 boom in NFTs has led to sales of some of the game’s real estate plots for more than $100,000.

2015 – Smart Contracts

Smart contracts were first proposed in the early 1990s by Nick Szabo, who coined the term to refer to “a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises.” Since the 2015 launch of the Ethereum blockchain, the term “smart contract” has been more specifically applied toward the notion of general-purpose computation that takes place on a blockchain or distributed ledger.

2016 – Pokémon GO

Pokémon Go was the first game to overlay a virtual world onto the real world. It uses mobile devices with GPS to locate, capture, train, and battle virtual creatures, called Pokémon, which appear as if they are in the player’s real-world location.

2016 – The DAO – Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

The company named The DAO was launched through a crowdfunded token sale in May 2016, setting the record for the largest crowdfunding campaign in history at that time. It was meant to be an alternative venture capital fund, created on Ethereum’s blockchain, that would serve as a decentralized funding model. In June 2016, users exploited a vulnerability in The DAO code which enabled them to siphon off one-third of DAO’s funds into a subsidiary account. This led to the death of The DAO as a company. But the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) lives on, yet substantially improved by lessons learned from The DAO experience. Moving forward, each DAO will serve as an essential ingredient for future metaverse companies that are governed collectively by participants in the organization, with rules and financial transactions recorded on the blockchain. DAOs, for example, have been formed around joint ownership of NFTs.

2017 – Fortnite

This multiplayer video game was a huge success upon its release, and it introduced many people to the look and feel of the metaverse and cryptocurrency. Fortnite user base totals 350 million.

2018 – Dai Stablecoin

The Dai Stablecoin was introduced to add a new element to the volatile crypto universe. In contrast to cryptocurrencies that aren’t anchored to any fiat currency or are only anchored to other cryptocurrencies, the centralized Dai Stablecoin was pegged to the U.S. dollar, making it far less volatile and more reliable cryptocurrency for decentralized finance (DeFi). Today, blockchain-based banking services are available on a number of similar platforms for cryptocurrency borrowing, lending, and investing. For now, they’re largely unregulated by our traditional institutions, and users seem just fine with that, for the most part.

2018 – Decentralized Exchanges (DEX)

Cyber currency exchanges took a major PR hit when Bancor lost $13.5 million to hackers. Although their legal/regulatory foundation remains a little uncertain, DEXes continue to serve as a way for people to sell and trade their cyber currency assets person-to-person based on smart contracts, rather than through a centralized exchange.

2018 – Axie Infinity

The popular NFT virtual reality game, Axie Infinity, based on a mythical world of animal husbandry, was introduced this year. By mid-2021 it had the highest combined value of NFTs of all play-to-earn game platforms.

2020 – COVID

When COVID exploded on the scene in 2020, people around the world found themselves being quarantined with few options to dedicate their time and energy to. For this reason, the metaverse quickly became the go-to place for a growing number of young people, gamers, and those wanting to make money in the online world. In our polarized world, the metaverse has taken on a tone of rebelling against current institutions – the more ingrained they are more they’re at risk. This is pushing people to the underground economies and worlds of the metaverse, setting up a “perfect storm” for Metaverse growth.

2020 – Decentralized Apps (Dapps)

The value of the tokens on the six major blockchain platforms surpassed $2 billion. The movement to cut out the middleman continues, as open-source, transparent applications continue to emerge to enable gaming, DEXes, DeFi, and other acronymized uses. While many people refer to dapps as an emerging trend, the first dapp was actually the Bitcoin app more than a decade ago.

2020 – First Concert in the Metaverse

In April 2020, Travis Scott and Marshmello performed in the video game, Fortnite to just under 30 million people.

2020 – Solana

Also in April, the Solana blockchain dapp was introduced. In contrast to Ethereum, this dapp’s cryptocurrency, called a SOL, is mined based on the alternate proof of stake (POS) algorithm. Further, issues related to block ownership were clarified and simplified in Solana, with a new consensus tool known as “proof of history” that inserts timestamps into its blockchain.

2020 – Alien Worlds

This wildly popular dapp was created with a multi-metaverse interplanetary scenario that had NFT characters interacting in a decentralized autonomous organization to mine tokens and perform other tasks. By 2021 Alien Worlds had more than 2.5 million users, but its significance goes beyond that – the game has been built around critical lessons for teaching people about the principles of cryptocurrency and crypto-mining.

To the Future

The evolution of various kinds of enabling technology and new features in the metaverse over the last few years has been incredible. But not as amazing as it will be beyond 2021.

In fact, in the future, there will be few if any aspects of society – including government, business, churches, entertainment, dating, politics, and even war – that will remain unchanged with the evolving Metaverse. It will have an especially profound effect on the way we educate ourselves and our children in the years ahead.