The erosion of consumer trust in governments and corporations
Crypto networks unlock novel ways to organize economic activity and incentivize human behavior using new programmatic systems
Software is eating finance, including the foundational concept of money
By making all units of value—stocks, bonds, real estate, currencies, and so forth—interoperable, programmable, and composable on distributed ledgers, capital markets will become more efficient and accessible to everyone on the planet.
Just as the proliferation of capital markets over the last 100 years supported staggering levels of wealth creation, the permissionless, expansionary effect of open finance will pave the way for new services and applications that will deliver tremendous value.
Whereas the open finance thesis is based on the idea of programmable money, the Web3 thesis is based on the vision of self-sovereign data. The Web3 vision empowers consumers to own their own data. This stands in stark contrast to the status quo, in which tech giants, banks, and credit bureaus control consumers' data. As this paradigm shifts, incumbents will lose their primary competitive advantage—their data monopolies—unlocking a massive wave of innovation and value creation.
When consumers own their own data, data monopolies will crumble. The second and third order effects of this will be profound, enabling the creation of new businesses and services that we can’t yet imagine
Many think of this as just “Digital Gold.” However we find that the digital gold framing is too narrow and substantially understates the opportunity. Global, state-free money is a superset of digital gold in terms of breadth and use cases, and it represents a dramatically larger market.
We expect the first digitally-native money to function as digital gold, but then also absorb some of the monetary premia of other non-gold stores of wealth. This is market expansionary to the current $7 trillion market cap of gold in the same way that Uber was market expansionary to taxis.