A tweet this week from Chris Frantz, the founder of email platform Loops, irked me.
Frantz said “90% of the people I know in web3 have pivoted their company to AI.”
What got to me was not that founders are so obsessed with securing venture capital that they’ll glob onto the next “in” thing. (Let’s save that problem of Silicon Valley fickleness for another time.) It was that people see the various elements of the complex new digital economy forming around us – artificial intelligence, blockchain, the metaverse, programmable money, digital identity, cryptographic proofs, quantum computing, IoT and so forth – as unrelated, exchangeable pieces, when they’re really intertwined and complementary.
You’re reading Money Reimagined, a weekly look at the technological, economic and social events and trends that are redefining our relationship with money and transforming the global financial system. Subscribe to get the full newsletter here.
AI will need Web3, and vice versa. Why not build both?
I see this harmful, reductionist simplification of “Web3,” “blockchain” and “crypto” stemming from a fundamental failure to identify the core, unifying feature of all projects that end up under those labels. To me, the commonality is that they all use a novel system of distributed record-keeping and incentives to deal with the basic problem of human trust around information. These technologies help communities of mistrusting strangers collectively maintain open data records that allow them to distribute and share valuable (or sensitive) information among themselves without the intermediation of middlemen.