Tales from the crypt(o): Alice in Blockchains proves that web3 is just starting up

1st day…

1. Ida Pandur spoke about pushing your career from web2 to web3 as there’s more opportunity to innovate in crypto. I generally agree that web3 offers more opportunity as the “pipelines are not fully built”, but data shows that *both* web2 and web3 worlds are still young (e.g. enterprise cloud adoption is at roughly 25%) so there’s a lot of room to innovate in all digital ecosystems. Personally, I think that most interesting innovations will come from merging of the two worlds; but this is a topic from 2nd day panel 🙂

2. Soraya Thompson presented some interesting cases of brands that utilize web3 tech (mostly NFTs). She spoke that brands should either look for revenue generation or loyalty building efforts and focus on the chosen tactic. Although the cases (Adidas, Nike etc.) were great examples; we will still need to wait on the “composable” cases – for example, using a Nike-based NFT to gain NBA-based benefits.

3. My hero of the day was Juan Guillen who – when asked by a moderator “what’s an example of good DAO governance?” – first scratched his head and then answered “I’ll pass on this one” <3

2nd day…

I’ve have had the privilege to moderate a “Future Of innovation” panel w. Ana Burica, Marijana Dumančić, Ivana Galić Baksa and Soraya Thompson on how technologies are shaping the present, but also the future of our world. It was fiery in some moments, but i think that we overall got together on couple of points:

• Ana Burica – we can finally move away from “move fast break things” mindset + future innovators will come from *both* top down centralized big tech and garage-style bottom-up builders
• Marijana Dumančić – open, immutable and transparent data that web3 offers is a low hanging fruit for FinTech startups
• Ivana Galić Baksa – media outlets will first need to internally educate themselves about future of innovation (as to provide responsible, educative and critical coverage of tech sector)
• Soraya Thompson – the famous price-innovation cycle is not so relevant moving forward + the barrier to enter web3 building space is lower than ever (with great tools, opensource libraries, open community etc.)

Two other talks that I really enjoyed is a fireside chat w. Amber Ghaddar & Ana Nives Radović on their thoughts on how traditional finance organizations (TradFi / CeFi) will play with web3 technology (DeFi). I totally agree with their conclusions that we’re venturing into a hybrid, heterogeneous world – which was a primer on most the essays here.

On the other note, Dejan Radić spoke about how to present real world items (stocks, houses, cars etc.) on blockchain tech and I have to say that I don’t buy those concepts. I’m more inclined that web3 will provide new ways of thinking (novel UX) and new asset classes, not pushing “old stuff” into new tech. Of course, there will be synthetic digital assets, but I just don’t see the need/case to host Apple or Tesla stock natively on Ethereum.

And to finish of – I’m rising my hat to Evin McMullen who spoke about (again) merging of the two worlds (web2 + web3) i.e. how personal data can influence web3 UX and how to leverage personalization patterns from web2 to improve on-chain experiences. Evin is a really great public speaker and I enjoyed how she nimbly sneaks in some of the technical terms (Alchemy node, CLI etc.) during the presentation.

All in all, Web3 Tales was a great event, massive success and yet another proof that web3 is just starting up. Kudos to the Alice in Blockchains team for making it happen.