VEECON 2022

The first of a 3-year commitment by Gary Vee (Vaynerchuk) to deliver a superconference on the interaction between Web 3, culture, technology, and business was a smash hit.

From the opening speech with Gary asking attendees to focus on the connections they will make, to the closing remarks and announcement of a collaboration between Snoop Dogg and Gary Vee’s (Veefriends), as Gary would say there was plenty of surprise and delight built into the conference.

Web 3

The premise of the conference was to explore what was possible in the world of Web 3. What is Web 3 I hear you echo? The simplest explanation is that Web 1 was the readable version of the internet (think Encyclopedia Britannica), Web 2 was the introduction of social media and bringing the read/write capability of the internet to the masses, and Web 3 is the portable and personal focus on tailoring a digital experience for the individual (Such as utilising the blockchain to digitally manage property rights).

The inception of Web 3 has been imagined through the world of gaming. In around 2012 the idea of buying digital assets in games was born, whilst this concept of owning skins in a game was revolutionary, it had its problems as a gamers ownership in the skin was limited to the one game, there was no portability of the skin. Fast forward to 2017 and Crypto Punks were born, a decentralised ownership in an NFT the “Crypto Punk” (see historical Blog for more context here). From that point on, the idea of the metaverse was born, a world where digital assets could move freely between platforms. Now to be frank, we still have a long way to go, however, the vision is there to own a character in an NFT collection and have the ability to take this character between different games.

How do we make it work?

So, it’s great having digital assets that you can wear or utilise in a game, but let’s face it, virtual reality headsets still have a way to go before we attain Stephen Spielberg’s ‘Ready Player One’ reality. So how do we fill the void? Well, therein lies the importance of a Veecon-like conference, it is through the coming together of like-minded individuals that we progress the new frontier. Forward-thinking business owners are actively trying to integrate this sense of digital ownership (Property Rights) with their physical interaction with the public.

Whether it is pairing a digitised NFT version of their sneaker (https://www.endstate.io/), or engaging in a platform that records the property rights of a real-life asset such as a 1988 Lamborghini Jalpa (https://rallyrd.com/collections/1988-lamborghini-jalpa/) on Rally Rd’s platform. The potential uses of blockchain technology and the implementation of a Web 3 mindset are endless.

Where this all ultimately leads us is the idea of tokenisation of our physical world into the digital. So fast forward and our homes will become tokenised, we might tokenise our business and democratise ownership of our brand, perhaps an easier way to digest this initially is to think of the tokenisation of a business as a membership club, but with time, who is to say this club membership doesn’t morph into an equitable interest in the profits of the business. By the way, in case you were wondering, there are already real-life examples of this, such as the Adam Bomb Squad NFT (https://www.adambombsquad.com/) created by the American Street apparel brand ‘The Hundreds’ where token holders are given royalties when the character in their token appears in an apparel line.

What’s next?

So is there a chance this all goes away? Well, if you liken this movement to the dot com bubble, there will be a large number of players in the space that do disappear for a raft of reasons. Whether it’s through lack of commitment to the cause, or lack of acknowledging that the communities built in the space (largely on discord/twitter) are critical to the ongoing success of projects, technology outpaces the need for digital ownership. None of us truly know what lies around the corner, but we can make educated guesses and just like Amazon during the dot com era, my educated guess is that the token economy and everything Web 3 promotes isn’t going away in a hurry.  

The conference obviously covered various other topics aimed at the convergence of our current world and Web3, to rattle off a few:

      1.     Intellectual Property in a Web 3 space.

      2.    Application of Web 3 to business.

      3.    The art of smart contracts and possibilities beyond the code.

      4.     Public Policy in the US

      5.     NFT’s for good, a discussion on utilising NFT’s to positively impact the world.

      6.     Cryptocurrency and the NFT marketplace

      7.      Decentralised Autonomous Organisations or Dao’s for short.

      8.     Different blockchain protocols and their relevance to Web 3.

      9.     Building Communities in Discord, becoming a Mod.

      10.   Generative Art

      11.    Gaming and the metaverse.

      12.   Fractional ownership

How we can help

If you are in business and would like to know how to deploy a Web 3 strategy in your business, please get in contact.

In the leadup to 30 June 2022, please also reach out if you have liquidated Crypto investments and need assistance assessing the tax implications.