What I Found Interesting: Week of 12/29
SBF provides his prediction of crypto in 2022, Fred Wilson gives an interesting perspective on the Web3 debate, Albert Wenger provides a history lesson with his optimism about Web3
Content that caught my attention last week.
Sam Bankman-Fried places a lot of focus on regulation in his Twitter thread and for good reason. SBF was called in front of congress recently to talk about this topic and, as the founder and operator of one of the largest centralized crypto exchanges, it makes sense that his focus is on this topic. While I don’t believe that we will see any resolution in regulation in the next year, I think that significant progress was made in 2021 and we will start to see more discussions being had in 2022. Here are his call outs for regulation:
Token issuance - The need for disclosures, registration and anti-fraud
Platform registration - The need for open networks that won’t be filtered to existing banks
Stablecoins - The need for reporting, transparency and auditing
AVC - Why Web3?
I always value Fred Wilson’s opinion when it comes to technology and innovation. He is always insightful and writes in a way that makes you agree with his conviction in the topic he writes about. His take on the recent Web3 debate is refreshing and I believe a good way of how we should think about how the technology should be evaluated. Debate is healthy and always present with innovation. While there are good arguments coming from both sides at the moment, it is obvious that new and unique value creation is necessary for Web3 to win out. Fred is optimistic that this will happen and emphasizes that action speaks louder than words.
Continuations - Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
Nested within the AVC article is a link to a fellow USV partner, Albert Wenger, who provides his argument in support of Web3. In his blog post, he provides a great historical example of a similar situation with PC’s and mainframes. The example he provides can be summarized as market leaders, who have all of the resources to ward off new technology, tend to downplay the new technology a start-up will provide rather than adapt. As history tells us, this ends up poorly for most of the market leaders. How this relates to blockchain is that most of the criticism about blockchain becoming a universal database is about speed and general support, rather than focusing on the bigger benefit of not having their data owned by any corporation.