Lessons - Exploring the Future of NFTs and the Web3 Economy | Edul Patel - Co-Founder & CEO Of Mudrex

In this lessons episode, we explore the evolving landscape of asset classes within Web3, covering sectors like crypto, NFTs, DeFi, and the Metaverse. Learn about the unique potential and future of NFTs beyond art. The transition from companies to communities and why Web3 SaaS might be the next big wave. Dive in for insights on how these sectors are set to shape the digital economy of tomorrow. And I'm curious because you're living it and you're in it so much. When you look at all these new, I guess, asset classes, but also like, if I, if I, what I mean by asset classes, maybe not be the right term, but you have like, you have crypto, and then you have like Web3 projects, you have DeFi projects, you have Metaverse projects, you have NFT projects. Do you feel like, and this is probably something like, you know, this is like a more repersonal question, do you feel like these will all maintain the same momentum? Like, do you feel like Metaverse is going to maintain the same Metaverse investment and projects are going to maintain the same momentum as NFTs and they're going to maintain the same momentum as crypto and like, there's so many different things like that, even you've captured on, on, on Madrex, but that people can now put their money into it's, it's becoming a different set of confusing, right? Because if you think about it, it's almost like when you are investing in stock buckets and you invest in different groupings of stocks, right? Like, and you can invest in tech stocks, you can invest in like, you know, global stocks or, or, or North American, and you can say your risk tolerance, but there's so many different things now. So do you see them all being around in the next 10 years, like not even just profitable, but do you see like Metaverse always being a thing, NFTs always being a thing that are people are going to invest in, or do you see this to be more of like a, it's relevant now, it's, it's, it's, it's something that's hot now, but in five years from now, we're just going to be really focused back on crypto again. Is it something that's short-term or long-term? As I get my question. So, so I think the theme will stay, but the players will change. So NFTs will be there, but, but the current projects doing NFTs might change, right? Metaverse will be there, but the current popular projects and Metaverse will change. And in fact, I, I shouldn't say might, they will most likely change because such is life, right? Like 90% of, of, of, of companies that were in the S&P 520 years ago on that course, and, and, and that's a reality. Having said that, the S&P 500 is there, and which is, which again, goes back to our argument of why thematic baskets are important, because like a basket has you bet in an idea and not a particular project, right? So the constituent of that, of that basket might continue to change over time, but the idea still remains. So Metaverse as a sector will continue to grow. NFT as a sector will continue to grow, but whether the individual constituents of NFT and Metaverse will grow or not, that that's of course dependent on what those individual projects end up doing was that life cycle, how is competition and, and so on. So you would always mess with me, is I understand the utility of crypto. I understand the utility of Web 3 projects and even some D5 projects that can be like actual utility. When I look at Metaverse, I can see utility as well. Actually, NFTs in particular, I find it it's hard to tie utility to NFTs. Like it's like even more of and maybe you can speak to some projects that you've seen that are counter to what I'm saying, because I'm sure there are some. And I know that for example, like, okay, we're just going to use like cliche is like like Gary Vee is very big on NFTs and he speaks a lot about how you tie, like NFTs to like actual tangible like events that you, you know, I think if he sells an NFT, he gets at people who buy that NFT get access to his conference, for example. So there's like an actual tangible thing tied to it, but I see a lot of NFTs are more like an art market, right. So there isn't a lot of tangible items tied to it. Do you feel like that could be a detriment to to the growth of NFTs in particular, or do you feel like more NFT projects are starting to try and find ways to actually tie a tangible valuable item to the purchase of artwork. So, so I generally think we haven't even scratched the surface of what NFTs are. And let's try and for the second, just talk about what what what NFTs, like as a name suggests, non-fungible tokens means that it's a token that's unique. And if you look at our real world, there are actually more things that are unique than there are generic, right. Like for example, the books that you have behind you are fairly unique, like the property that you own is fairly unique, the phone that you own is fairly unique. And for that matter, your resume is fairly unique, like your identity and your status hierarchy in your let's say organization is fairly unique. And all of these things are fairly unique. And today, the only unique things that we've quite sort of set up and got ready in the NFT world is essentially art. So we just return to look at one small part that actually doesn't affect a vast majority of me. So let me let me give you an example of how people are thinking about NFTs. So there is a friend of mine who's building a project out in the Dow tooling space. Well, by that, what I mean is that they're helping Dow's figure out how should they get their contributors to work together. And one interesting idea that they are working on is that how can they create an NFT resume of everyone, which means that it's a it's a it's an on-chain resume that has these 15 different properties. And let's say for the sake of simplicity, simplicity, let's say that on that resume, there is a property that says tech. And in that tech part, you have some skills for Python, some skills for Java, some skills for front end and so on and so forth. So they're trying to figure out a way as how can they meet this resume using NFT rewards that individual dolls can give to their to their contributors and scale up from there. So effectively, how do you kinds of attribute unique properties unique contributions that you give get that on-chain and make sure that's cemented and stays there. So from the NFT specific perspective, I think we are literally just catching the service. And as time progresses, all the things that we felt about unique goods or services in the real world will probably continue to move towards the internet and the digital world via this. Now, of course, a lot of these might become complete users. For example, a ticket to a conference can be made in an NFT, but also conferences done that NFTs basically use less. What do you want to do with the ticket stuff? And that's perfectly fine, right? So as a result, what how does that NFT have long-term value with a separate problem and things like art do have long-term value? Things like a particular project that you did for a particular company on your resume does have long-term value, but a ticket stop to a conference does not and we should be okay with that. That different purposes. But I think what's interesting was I always found the tokenization of things to make sense tokenization of unique IP to make sense, but then it seemed like NFT became synonymous with art for some strange reason. Just because you're saying it was like the first iteration of NFT, it's just scratching the surface, but there's so many other ways that tokenizing something so that it can be transferred and not duplicated and tracked can be a very useful mechanism. Absolutely. If you 100%, but I just I thought it was strange that there was blockchain companies that were trying to tokenize different things, records, like all these different items, like fixing supply chain issues and whatnot, like through tokenization of data points, almost, and then it just turned into like a bunch of artwork, which is just strange. The thing with this rate, pets.com went bust in 2019, but there is an entire gamut of online pet companies now that are thriving and growing rapidly. It's not necessarily the first iteration should work out, right? It's the attempts that people are trying to do and that's why this space is so so hot, right? Like the smartest minds of our generation today are saying that the world and how are essentially coming back and saying that how the world is involved over the last three hundred four hundred five hundred years fundamentally needs to change if you want to move more and more and more towards the internet and Web 3 is all about capturing, attributing and transferring value for the value that individuals are trying to create, whether that be the value created via a service, whether that be the value created via a good or whatever. And crypto blockchain truly opens that space up, right? That's why it's very unique and that's why it's like inherently attractive to so many smart people and I just continue from there. And last question on this, as you see all these different categories in sections, like we see like NFT and DeFi and crypto and Web 3 and then Metaverse, are there any sectors that are not popular yet that you found like what is the future evolution of some of these some of these sectors that may not be categorized yet that like you in particular are excited about because they're so new, is there something that we haven't heard of? Correct, so like and again, this is another conversation that I was just having last week with the friend of mine. See, one very interesting sector that I really like is that is how are you getting people together and getting them to work? Like all of crypto is essentially communities coming together working on a small problem, solving that problem, moving ahead to the next problem, right? Like that's basically all of crypto is which means that in the traditional world we had companies, now we had communities. Now if this analogy is true, in the traditional world, we had tech agencies help out companies with their tech, we had marketing agencies help out companies with their marketing, we had HR agencies help out company with their HR, we had peer agencies help out companies with their payroll, right? And if all of these kinds of SaaS services were built out around companies to help them either serve their employees or their customers better, I expect all of this to get recreated in the in the community side as well, right? Because at the end of the day, the problems remain the same, there's the nature in which they are executed, change. So communities today need help with how should they get their contributors to contribute, communities need help in terms of keeping their users sticky, communities need help in terms of outreaching to their users in kind of sort of an on-chain way without having an email address attached other associated with them, right? And I think this web trees SaaS effective kinds of industries now just going to get kicked started off because I think we now reach like a critical mass of communities and nows where it starts to make sense for we to build businesses and pools that help contribute and improve the kind of set of dows and communities that are the next couple of years will actually be actually enough seeing a lot of companies come out in in this space. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.