Away from the din of 18,000 people at the Consensus 2022 conference, Sandeep Nailwal, CEO of Polygon and I caught up. This covers all things Layer 2 and the Merge coming from the Ethereum upgrade.
Tech Snippets Today – Awa Sun Yin – Anoma
On the ground with 18,000 people humming about at Consensus 2022, I met with Awa Sun Yin the dynamic leader of Anoma in the crypto space. She has been at several very high profile organizations like Chainalysis and Cosmos. Currently she is solving for developers issues around privacy and security leveraging blockchain. She is based in Switzerland.
Forum: The LawFirmDAO offers bold predictions of future firm partnerships
Originally published in Forum Magazine
By Joseph Raczynski
Could decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) revolutionize how law firm partnerships are going to be structured in the near future?
Imagine a fully decentralized law firm. What might that look like? What if every attorney who opted in became a partner from Day 1, equitably sharing the benefits and firm profits? Gone is the elongated timeline to reach ownership, prestige and profit potential. Further, what if I said this could be built now with computer code that provided full transparency into rules, roles, profit sharing, voting, governance, and that even creates a sense of clarity and community – all out of the box?
Welcome to LawFirmDAO, a hypothetical but now feasible entity created within a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
Mind you, I know of no one who has written or talked about this, but this LawFirmDAO concept is something that could be the future of law firm structure. The reason? The lack of transparency within some law firms on occasion has been their undoing. Howrey and LeClairRyan both were victims of a few partners making decisions sometimes in a vacuum, without a wider participation of the firm’s attorneys; this ended up costing the firms dearly.
For some perspective, let’s unpack the essence of what a DAO means. DAOs are essentially entities built on code, leveraging smart contracts and tokens that permit token holders (attorneys) to vote on decisions the organization (the law firm) is considering. Fundamentally, a DAO is a blockchain structure – think of it as a safe database – that anyone can leverage to self-govern through participation. The entity is authored by rules that are baked into the code, permitting voting through digital tokens, sort of like cryptocurrency – all while leveraging smart contracts.
So, what does this mean? A DAO is a newer governance structure that humans (for now) are creating, which has a stated purpose and a plan to execute decisions via code. Let’s explore how this would work for LawFirmDAO.
Decision-making and profit-taking in LawFirmDAO
As a component of Web3, the next generation of asset tokenization, DAOs create a structure of governance. (Currently, most of the successful DAOs are built on the Ethereum blockchain.) Participants are essential to this structure, and they are directly linked to that organization in a verifiable and provable way.
This is accomplished via a digital wallet, linked to a blockchain that contains your assets, money, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), deeds and your DAO tokens – the latter proving you are a part of that organization. Think of it as your digital identity card to partake in the governance of the DAO. Each attorney would have a wallet with the LawFirmDAO tokens inside permitting them to connect to the DAO, create proposals and vote. The intent is to move away from a top-down model, and inherently a DAO structure enables this.
A well-written DAO drives community, fostering the creation of guilds within it to create new opportunities; the DAO then rewards people based on their individual participation.
In this vision of LawFirmDAO, a founder, for the purpose of creation, sets forth a plan to create the firm with all the typical rules of governance, but in full transparency and outlined in code, which is stored on a blockchain. After its creation, the founder withdraws as the leader to be an equal partner with all other participants, i.e., attorneys. The DAO is created, and tokens (shares) are issued. Prospective attorneys coming on board interact with the code via a friendly app or website, connecting in a digital wallet.
Compensation and work matters could be doled out simply as well. For example, attorneys could choose Option A and be rewarded for every client they bring in at 80% of those fees; or Option B and they are rewarded 10% of client fees because they did not bring in the client but worked the matter. In this way, attorneys could shift from one type of work matter to another by choice, simply by reassigning themselves and the code verifying it’s acceptable. Virtually every nuance of a firm governance structure could be pushed into this paradigm via code, verifiable via the blockchain.
Profits for the equity partners would be calculated by fees and automatically generated with their direct success via smart contracts. Rewarding structures are innumerable. Proposals from anyone in the LawFirmDAO would be offered via an online voting mechanism, verifying the person by their token in the DAO, and allowing them to put something to a vote – such as the creation of a new practice area in the next week, opening an office in Lagos or voting to change the profit structure. In this way, a DAO offers full transparency, equity, innovation, incentives, all of which are auditable and viewable in code. No one group or individual is dictating the direction, rather it is a verifiable way to be inclusive and egalitarian in its authorship and action – again, all via code.
An additional advantage to a DAO is the incentivized benefits aligned to the structure created within it. A well-written DAO drives community, fostering the creation of guilds within it to create new opportunities; the DAO then rewards people based on their individual participation. While a guild harkens back to the age of people forming groups of like-minded and skilled individuals, attorneys can do the same inside their LawFirmDAO. As a flat organization, everyone can propose ideas for vote, and if selected, chosen for action.
Legal DAO generator
Separate from this new partnership model created with a DAO, we will likely see DAOs created by law firms for their clients, which would allow for a coupling of current legal tech tools and blockchain. Issuance of a DAO could be done through an application like a contract automation tool; and for any company that wanted to create a DAO, the law firm would populate all applicable parameters – the name of the company and the token, number of tokens available, etc. – and then the firm could create the DAO, and, if necessary, file the business license with the appropriate state. (At the moment, only Wyoming has created laws around DAOs.)
Once this DAO has been created, another connected piece would be the voting mechanism. In this world, DAO participants would leverage their Web3 wallet to connect into the proposal and voting site. Once on the site, members would be able to vote on current ideas or propose actionable matters themselves. Each of these actions is stored on a blockchain that is inherently provable and verifiable.
The LawFirmDAO could be the future direction of equitable, democratic, transparent law firms that all parties can buy into through a Web3 DAO token. The fostering of community and innovation that this structure will birth could be transformative.
Tech Snippets Today – New Series Release!
As a way to encapsulate my travels and meetings with ridiculously accomplished and fascinating people from around the world, I am releasing a new series called Tech Snippets Today. These are informal conversations with some of the brightest minds across the world pushing the limits on emerging tech.
On a normal day, before major conferences, I get about 30 requests a day to meet and talk. In the past I have discrete conversations with individuals and have done write-ups, or taken copious notes for later ideation sessions. These are often too good for me alone to enjoy. To that end, going forward new conversations will be recorded with some of these people, businesses, and stories that I have found to be the most intriguing in technology today.
Enjoy the chats as they come, interspersed with normal blogging here at JoeTechnologist and often mirrored at Thomson Reuters.
I am looking forward to this, with some very cool interviews coming… one quick teaser. The grand master chess player who lost to IBM Deep Blue AI back in 1996… is in the editing queue right now.
If you have any comments, feel free to reach out!
Animated Series: What’s Up with the Metaverse
Originally published on the ABA Center for Innovation, Innovation and You
by Joseph Raczynski with creative by Elise Harmening, Esq.
What’s Up with the Metaverse, was written by Joseph Raczynski of Thomson Reuters, a member of the Governing Council for the Center for Innovation, and created by Elise Harmening, Esq., Project Specialist Manager at the Center for Innovation.
Animated Series: What is an API?
Originally published on the ABA Center for Innovation, Innovation and You
by Joseph Raczynski with creative by Elise Harmening, Esq.
What is an API?, was written by Joseph Raczynski of Thomson Reuters, a member of the Governing Council for the Center for Innovation, and created by Elise Harmening, Esq., Project Specialist Manager at the Center for Innovation.
5 questions about the environmental impact of crypto-mining
Originally published on Thomson Reuters Insights by Gina Jurva, with Joseph Raczynski.
Is the act of mining for cryptocurrency damaging to the environment? We asked our resident technologist to assess this emerging landscape
Two hot words in the corporate and financial worlds today seem to be cryptocurrencies and ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance issues) — yet, are the two intertwined? More specifically, are cryptocurrencies environmentally friendly or are they a global threat to meeting climate targets as articulated at the recent United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP26)?
We spoke to Joseph Raczynski, Thomson Reuters’ resident Technologist & Futurist and early adopter of cryptocurrency, about crypto-mining, the cost to the environment, and its sustainability going forward.
Thomson Reuters Institute: In its most basic terms, what is crypto-mining?
Joseph Raczynski: The traditional act of mining cryptocurrency is driven by heavy computer processing power as processors race to solve a mathematical problem first, so that the sole winner can add a grouping of transactions to the blockchain. For example, a transaction could be one person sending another person money via Bitcoin.
Computer processing power — which you can tangibly feel as your machine gets warm — means the processor is working very hard to do something. The act of mining financially rewards the first computer, or grouping of pooled computers, that solve the mathematical puzzle with that cryptocurrency’s native token. In the Bitcoin example, more than 100,000 nodes (computer groupings) all over the world are competing to win the race, and if they do, they earn 6.25 Bitcoin (valued today around $237,500) for the ability to add the grouping of transactions to the next block on the chain. This happens roughly every 10 minutes.
Baked into the code is a reduction of the reward over time, and there is a fixed supply of Bitcoin that will ever exist, so the mining becomes likely more difficult over time depending on how many computers are competing at any given moment. This process is called proof of work and is heavily energy intensive; while another form of mining consensus is proof of stake and is far more efficient.
Thomson Reuters Institute: How much does cryptocurrency cost the environment?
Joseph Raczynski: This is a very nuanced and politically divisive topic. Having been in this space since 2011, I can see both sides of the debate, and I believe I can distill its reality. Proof of work is natively inefficient, as it uses lots of electricity to solve that mathematical problem to win the reward. On its face value, this is not environmentally sound.
However, crypto-miners intrinsic interest lies in being as electrically efficient as possible because energy consumption is their principal expense after the hardware investment of fast computers and processors, which are also called mining rigs. Miners seek out the cheapest places in the world to plug their rigs into the electrical grid. They pursue renewables — solar, wind, and hydro power — and have used the blow-off captured from natural gas, which would have been lost or burned as waste.
Although the quest for clean energy is increasingly being sought, not all crypto-miners are doing this. There is little question that proof of work is a cost for the environment, but it is not as catastrophic as some suggest. An intangible effect, of course, is aligning that energy consumption and environmental impact with the benefit that cryptocurrency has created via a vast new industry. The technology has created an internet of value that we will all leverage, so there is a cost benefit that is being struck as well.
Thomson Reuters Institute: Could the impact of crypto-miners be reduced in some way?
Joseph Raczynski: Another fascinating argument about the environmental impact is that crypto-miners are essentially the new intermediary. Be it banking, legal, insurance, supply chain, or most other transactional businesses, each of these enterprises could be replaced with a blockchain. As a result, all of the physical and environmental impacts of those institutions could be negated with a move to blockchain. Think of the electricity used to build and run office buildings, the workers who travel, gas and oil used, materials needed, and all other combinations of energy and environmental impact that any such institution has on the environment — that would be reduced with the underlining technology that would serve its purpose. Ultimately, proof of stake solves this environmental issue, but proof of work is something that will persist, in a decreasing form.
Thomson Reuters Institute: One cryptocurrency, Ethereum, said it wants to reduce its energy use almost 100% this year through transitioning to a proof of stake process. How can cryptocurrencies use proof of stake to be more sustainable?
Joseph Raczynski: There is great news afoot that pretty much solves the electricity issue, and in turn, the environmental problem. The primary blockchains, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Cosmos, along with many others and which are the future of the industry, rely on proof of stake, which itself relies on a different mechanism to confirm and add transactions to the digital ledger. There are many flavors of proof of stake, but if someone wishes to participate as a crypto-miner in this instance, they are not using processing power to win a mathematical race. Instead, each person puts up money, or a stake, to participate. These users are hoping to earn anywhere from 7% to 1,000% on the money that they stake, by locking it into a smart contract that reinforces the resiliency of the network. The incentive is that the more money that people stake, the greater the network effect and security.
Currently, the potential of these high interest rates at are driving tens of billions of dollars into staking. Of those participating, the code dictates who actually gets to save the latest batches of transactions to the blockchain. There is a disincentive if you are a bad actor and try to upend or alter a block, by saving information to the ledger, for example. If you attempt to disrupt the network, you get slashed which means your stake could be confiscated. Proof of stake is expected to reduce the electrical consumption of crypto-mining by well over 99%. Ethereum should be upgraded to this version in 2022, and that alone will reduce the environmental impact.
Thomson Reuters Institute: Does mining and transacting with cryptocurrencies actually contribute to climate change?
Joseph Raczynski: If proof of work continued with Ethereum, which is the most-utilized blockchain in the world, then yes, crypto-mining could have had a negative impact on climate change over time. However, the upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 (ETH2), on a proof of stake model will dramatically change this.
DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and Regulation
Originally published on Cryptos on the Rise.
A DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) is a revolutionary change in the manner that people and businesses can organize. Leveraging blockchain technology, it is a decentralized model of control and governance. The essence of a DAO is transparency, clarity of rule, and process driven decisions – primarily utilizing smart contracts on distributed ledgers. Once a DAO has been established, via a blockchain, participants take ownership of its token, which allow them to participate in the system. Token holders can propose changes, and can vote on those changes, with the subsequent actions being taken, “leaderlessly”. There are no CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, only code and community.
Close to 5,000 DAOs have been formed to date, expecting to grow exponentially. Many involve pooling digital money together to purchase assets, both physical and digital. ConstitutionDAO was established seven days prior to the auctioning of one of the eleven remaining copies of the US Constitution. The intent, to purchase and house it at a protected public location. Participants in the DAO contributed money in ETH (Ethereum token) to the cause, raising $45 million. Separately, the AssangeDAO raise $53 million for the criminal defense of Julian Assange. These are quick and powerful ways form decentralized autonomous organizations.
Central to a DAO is transparency. Anyone can see which individual (wallet address) owns tokens. Tokens allow for people to vote on proposals. Anyone can create a proposal. Simply stated, and in an ideal setting, it is egalitarian. Challenges to the model are its extremely democratic nature, i.e. voting on everything. As a result, it can be overly deliberate and result in a slower process compared to a more centralized formed organization like a corporation.
With this nascent, but extremely powerful organizational structure, the regulatory landscape at the state level is nearly non-existent. Wyoming, which has led the US on regulation for blockchain and cryptocurrency, recently codified rules for DAOs residing in the state. Therefore, a DAO could be created under the laws of the State of Wyoming. No other state enables this yet. Further, there is a movement afoot for corporations in the cryptocurrency space to dissolve and become DAOs. With potentially hawkish regulation on the horizon for cryptocurrency, DAOs, by their very nature, are code based, self-running, leaderless entities running via a decentralized network, which permits actions based on how users interact under brassbound, predefined rules. Theoretically, under the current regulatory landscape there is nothing the law can do about such an entity. The converted corporation to a DAO would no longer be in control of the platform, which reverts to a completely new decentralized model, unlike anything regulated currently.
According to the SEC guidance issued in 2017, they determined that “The DAO”, an entity raising money in an ICO, Initial Coin Offering, that it was indeed a security. The difference here is that many of the DAOs created now are under the auspices of “investment clubs” or are simply voting mechanisms, whereby the SEC generally does not regulate, unless met by the “Securities Act of 1933” regulating the offer and sale of those membership interests, or under the Investment Company Act of 1940 (1940 Act), or if a person who is paid for providing advice regarding the investments of the club or its members may be an investment adviser under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 (Advisers Act) or state law. (SEC, https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor-publications/investorpubsinvclubhtm.html)
The SEC is reportedly looking into true DAOs like Uniswap in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, as a decentralized exchange (DEX), which is a code-based organization that matches buyers and sellers of cryptocurrency. One area of focus is lending pools, where users will provide their assets for other users to trade, which provide healthy yields, just as banks provide interest on your assets. This may fall into the Howey Test investment contract realm.
DAOs are in their embryonic stage with legislatures and regulators. There is little question that this space if bursting with potential and therefore creating a framework with regulation is certainly on the horizon.
Lawyers and the Metaverse
Interview from Asian Legal Business published April 2022
How did you discover your passion for all things innovation and technology related?
When I was a young boy, I watched a movie that transformed my life then and by happenstance altered my path forward. War Games, starring Matthew Broderick was about an inquisitive kid who unintentionally almost started World War 3 by hacking into a U.S. Government mainframe computer. Broderick’s approach to solving problems was mind altering for me at the time. More than anything that movie taught me the power of creativity in thinking and designing processes to accomplish tasks in a novel way leveraging technology, sometimes with computer code, sometimes by tying disparate technologies together. Since that day I have been immersed in technology, starting with the beginning of the Internet via BBS (Bulletin Boards), setting up networks, peer-to-peer file sharing, designing websites World Wide Web, testing of mining cryptocurrency, creating my own tokens, white hat hacking, and then tinkering with electronics of all sizes. Eventually, I added the professional layers from an undergraduate degrees of economics and sociology and a Masters in Business Administration and eCommerce, combined with my own interests in geopolitical trends, finance, and the legal implications of it all. All of this really excites me to no end!
You’ve written about the Metaverse and the preparedness of lawyers, how widespread do you think use of this will be in the near future, and how can lawyers make sure they are sufficiently prepared?
If by the near future we are saying 3-5 years, I would say 100% that the Metaverse will be used in various forms by the majority of the population in the industrialized world. It has already started. There are two forces at play which are enabling the Metaverse; one, blockchain, which is a unique way to store information in a provable, unalterable way. Secondly, the coming hardware is key. Likely to hit the mainstream when Apple releases their Virtual Reality or Mixed Reality headset in the coming year or so, this will force all of us to head into the Metaverse. Just for perspective, VR is fully immersive, while MR allows you to see the physical world and places digital imagery on top of that.
I have likely spoken to thousands of lawyers over the last several years. Extraordinarily bright to a one that I have interacted with, the one limiting factor in this sense, is their dedication to their own craft. Meaning, most often and understandably, they do not have the time to pick up their heads and see what is coming. All of these emerging technologies will impact their practice in some way, as well as the business of law. At a minimum, lawyers need the opportunity to focus on the big four: AI, Blockchain, Workflow, and the grab bag of General Emerging Technology. There are a multitude of places to learn about these things, including at Joetechnologist.com but I would include some of the classics with Google alerts, Twitter threads on these topics and magazines like Wired, which should be a staple for everyone.
What kind of opportunities could the Metaverse give lawyers?
Imagine a world, much like what we have now, but only digital. It is nearly as immersive and interactive, and then extrapolate out all the problems, issues, benefits, and challenges we have currently in real life, and think about where lawyers play a role. It will be similar. In the beginning much of legal’s play will be on IP issues and copyright. Soon thereafter, insurance and contractual disagreements will ensue, but these contract issues could be interesting because of the nature of the platform a metaverse will be built upon. Since it should rely on blockchain and smart contracts, these disputes could likely be easier to solve at the lower tier, leaving lawyers to resolve more complex issues.
We’ve heard that tech adoption rapidly increased during the pandemic — what are some of the significant ways this has changed the way lawyers work, or indeed the legal profession?
The adoption of technology has been fascinating to watch across the legal landscape over the last two years. My favorite part was how lawyers who were technologically phobic were gently pushed into the space and most thrived. Bigger picture, the acceptance and now reliance on the Cloud has been massive. Once upon a time, most law firms would have shuttered at the thought of its use. Now Cloud has become nearly ubiquitous. With that adoption has come greater use of workflow tools around document automation processing transactional documents much faster and more reliably for clients. I have also seen greater openness to this idea of a Legal Platform, meaning an ecosystem like a portal which is first secure, yet open to applications, that can be used in a “containerized” fashion. What that means are apps that are interoperable and secure, resulting in greater efficiency and productivity. The last area of growth was around law firms open to APIs, or data feeds which allows them to bring in information, comingle it with their own, create new workflows, and leverage out of the box analytics tools to garner greater insights into both the business and the practice of law.
What can lawyers do to ensure they access all opportunities offered by the variety of tech innovations?
I firmly believe lawyers need to dedicated time, almost every day, be it 30 minutes, to read up on current awareness in technology. Some days they will find a topic they could spend a week on, but they should try to unpack that in time, to better position themselves for the future of the industry, and more tangibly, in the short term to help their clients.
How does our engagement with digital worlds/environments shape the way we work and the kind of work we carry out?
If we presume we are moving increasingly into a digital world, then every nuance surrounding that space will become increasingly important. Start with AI. Algorithms will increasingly be able to make decisions for us. Yes, this includes much of the lawyerly work out there. These algos start of simply, but will become far more complex, freeing us from some decisions or work. Stack on top of that blockchain, which is a trustless (trusted) database, meaning both AI and blockchain can work in tandem to begin doing some pretty impressive workflows that are automated. When we move into the Metaverse for both fun and business, everything can be quantified, e.g. the house, shoes, art, tickets to a concert, via an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) which uses a blockchain. Processes will increasingly be leveraging data and AI to make decisions which will rely less on human intervention. I know this can sound frightening, and it could be, which is why as this progresses, we need the best legal minds to understand the implications, yet keep a progressive mindset to guide the path forward. We do not merely wish to replicate everything we have in the real world, but try to evolve it to the best we humanly can, until AI takes over, kidding, not kidding.
Mind-shifting into blockchain, cryptocurrency, and the future of asset ownership in the metaverse
Originally posted on Our Purpose – Thomson Reuters
Are you ready to jump down the rabbit hole? Well, so begins one of the most transformative periods in human history. What began as a widely dismissed experiment unleashed on the world by an anonymous author became a phenomenon that will alter corporations, governments and your own personal finances. As a technologist and futurist in a company widely respected for its ability to inform the way forward for professionals in the legal, tax and accounting and government sectors, I’m frequently asked how these technologies will shape the world we live in. While some of the shifts are already underway, most are yet to come, Ultimately, these technologies will change commerce, law, taxes and wealth creation, and how we interact with each other. How is this possible? Let us start with the building blocks of our future infrastructure.
Bitcoin invented blockchain technology in 2009 with their white paper. Blockchain enables a decentralized ledger to run on thousands of computers globally. Through sophisticated consensus mechanisms, the machines confirm transactions between two entities. They accomplish these trades without banks or government oversight. The underlying technology Bitcoin uses is called blockchain, which is the secret sauce of this monumental infrastructural shift. So, while Bitcoin is neat, blockchain is our future tech.
Foundational infrastructural blocks
Our history starts with Web 1.0, the early internet in 1990, when we read content and clicked links to viewable information. In the early 2000s, along came “Web2,” allowing direct user interaction, for example “likes” or “voting up” content. That was a computational marvel of coding at the time. We are now entering “Web3.” It is the most significant paradigm shift since the internet began. Web3 ushers in the ability to tokenize assets. This means you can leverage blockchain, a trusted database, to create the internet of value and a web of digital asset ownership that is provable and verifiable without third parties. For simplicity, tokens represent digital shares or ownership of something.
Unpacking Web3
As a result of blockchain, myriad cryptocurrencies were born leveraging this tech. Some will have real potential to compete against a national currency like the dollar. Sixteen thousand cryptocurrencies exist today. Eighty-three central banks around the world are now fast-tracking Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) (to compete against this shift to cryptocurrency.) Regulators the world over are also attempting to keep up. Many of the 16,000 will falter, but the appeal of these cryptocurrencies is that they are building new use cases of the internet of value. Some have programmed into their code, scarcity, and some deflationary attributes. For people living in countries with high inflation, these cryptocurrencies act as a hedge. Importantly, people can hold assets individually, cryptographically, without a bank. The owner has a lock and key to their money and need only to interact with the blockchain via their digital wallet. As a result, the valuation of cryptocurrency reached 3 trillion dollars recently.
DeFi
The next building block for this vision is transforming the financial industry. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is reimagining what the industry could look like without intermediaries. By its nature, blockchain removes third parties because the code and underlying math does the verification. Currently, DeFi has hundreds of billions of dollars locked into various blockchains, using “smart contracts” and cryptocurrency. A smart contract is a few lines of computer code that creates an “if/then” statement, for example, if Amazon® stock is at $2,000 on January 1, 2019, then sell it.
What is special about smart contracts on the blockchain is that once an agreement has been reached by two parties, it is programmed onto the platform and becomes self-executing and immutable – without any human intervention, what a human or bank would have done to record something. For example, in DeFi, if I wanted to earn 20% interest on my cryptocurrency (my money), I could sign a smart contract within my digital wallet telling the blockchain to hold in custody the money for an agreed period, netting me 20%. Nearly every imaginable financial instrument is being ported over into DeFi.
NFTs and the Metaverse
The next stage of blockchain, cryptocurrency and DeFi are Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). They represent anything physical or digital registered to the blockchain. NTFs give an asset a unique code or hash or name that can be checked and is verifiable on that digital ledger. We will use this to prove ownership of assets, such as the deed to your car or house. Recently, NFTs have taken the art and music world by storm. Billions of dollars of digital art have been purchased in the last year. As we move into the Metaverse, an eventual virtual place for business and entertainment, those assets will have even more value in virtual homes or in a digital Times Square. It is surreal to contemplate, but this will happen in the next handful of years, all enabled by blockchain.
DAOs – The future of organizational structures
Going forward, the final building block to the blockchain stack are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations or DAOs. These are essentially entities built on code, leveraging smart contracts and tokens permitting token holders to vote on decisions that the organization is considering. In the next several years, I predict a major sports franchise will be owned by a DAO. Imagine being a token holder in that DAO and being able to vote on who is drafted. Recently, a copy of the Unites States Constitution was nearly won at auction by a DAO. This will be commonplace soon.
These are early days of blockchain and what it has birthed – cryptocurrency, DeFi, NFTs and DAOs. The emergence of these technologies will mean that professionals in the legal, tax and accounting and government sectors can expect to see significant changes in the years ahead. The abundance of new opportunities in nearly every field, including legal, tax, and government, is immense. The legal industry will see nearly every angle impacted for both the business and practice of law. Contracts will be automated and interactive leveraging blockchain. Litigation will rely on truth from transactions on the chain. In tax, applications will need to digest and interpret these ledgers, but will provide even more clarity about global transactions. Governments will likely need to regulate and help interpret how these amorphous systems are framed in our world. There is little doubt that this will transform both our personal and professional lives, especially as we move into the Metaverse.
Joe Raczynski | Technologist 