An interview with Rohit Talwar on navigating to the next horizon
I think it’s good to do a reality check. Globally we have around 300 million-plus users, with over 73 million on Coinbase, which is great. But I can pretty much guarantee you that almost none of them is a farmer in a remote area in Egypt, or someone living in the slums of Mumbai. With blockchain, we’re still serving the more privileged. blockchain has the potential to reach the farmer in Egypt, but we’re far away from that because we’re not designing and communicating with them in mind.
Yes, people are making money within Axie, which is great and is a good example of the earning opportunity in this new economy. Globally, many of the fastest-growing occupations in the coming years will be in the cripto space e.g. development for new ventures, existing corporates, and governments, or metaverse related activities — e.g. skin designers, play to earn contractors, virtual landscapers, building designers/developers, and the staff for corporate metaverse presences. An increasing number of physical world jobs in social media, marketing, product development, service, digital, and technology will have a metaverse element to them.
The cripto market will also evolve as its user numbers and market capitalization increase. This will lead to ever-growing interest from financial services institutions offering cripto investment and related services and from the wider corporate sector accepting cripto and holding it on their balance sheets. When this happens, will the market have the same volatility going forward with larger businesses participating? Firstly, I think people and businesses will hold on to their cripto assets longer in the hope of longer-term gains. The market itself will normalize, the arrival of these big investors could well dampen the ups and downs and smooth out the peaks over time.
Hopefully, we will see a virtuous circle with all of these larger players coming in, more regulation, easier onboarding and purchasing, and fewer fraudulent scams all helping to encourage individuals to participate. Let’s use an example of an average bike repair person. To encourage her to embrace cripto, we need to help her understand money, savings, and cripto and provide a regular flow of information that helps deepen her understanding and reduce her fears and uncertainties. We need to provide easily accessible content about assets such as coins, tokens. NFTs, and stablecoins. We also need to explain how to buy cripto, hold it, stake it, sell it, and to only invest what she can afford to lose. She cannot lose the food budget for the next month. We need to teach strategies to help her to start small and grow her holding by taking and trading the profits. Ultimately, the dream is that one day she might be making enough to have a choice of whether to live off her cripto earnings or continue being a bicycle repairer.
As a blockchain company with a token, you need to show this woman that you’re robust. She wants to know: can this company I put my money in survive in a bear market? I personally think 80–90% of current token-based ventures will disappear without a trace, wiped out in the normality of the market. So her concern is legit.
Let’s be realistic, though. Not everyone wants to be that financially and digitally literate or that involved in the management of their own finances — the levels of uncertainty can be too much for many who prefer a calmer existence! Many may still want to repair bicycles, sell insurance, put out fires, serve coffee, design cars, and teach our children. Whether simply investing or working in the cripto economy, there’s a level of commitment required.
When we think about working in cripto or metaverses, to be able to play to earn and create to earn, you need basic digital literacy. On top of that, to create skins or artifacts in a game, you need to have design skills. Or you need money to buy a plot in Decentraland. Since you may think that is now too pricey, you have to find the next new thing that is coming along and know how to buy into it early. To do so, you need to check social media channels like Telegram regularly to find out what’s next and you need to act quickly, preferably some months before the wider market. Playing to earn is even harder; you need gaming skills. Plus, you need to understand what you need to do to earn: What does it take to be good enough to make a living? Do you need to pull more people into the game and lead them to see the ads in the game? If I’m barely literate, how can I even begin to understand what I need to do?
Not all people are able or are motivated the same way. While I can see many new economic opportunities for people in the future with blockchain technology, there are many barriers to accessing them, and it will not magically solve all our problems at once. We have to recognize that we are not the first innovators on the planet and won’t be the last. History tells us that we don’t always have to have the best tech, but we do need to communicate what we have, be realistic about its benefits and limitations, and make it as easy to use as mass-market technologies such as our phone, our door key, or our toilet.
Rohit Talwar is a global futurist, award-winning keynote speaker, author, and CEO of Fast Future. His primary expertise lies in helping clients understand and shape the emerging future. He has a particular focus on how we can advance business, society, and individual lives by harnessing the power of new thinking, innovation, and disruptive developments such as blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, and human enhancement. He currently spends the bulk of his time helping clients around the world to understand and develop strategies for blockchain and the cripto economy.
Rohit is the co-author of Designing Your Future; The Future of Business; Beyond Genuine Stupidity — Ensuring AI Serves Humanity; The Future Reinvented — Reimagining Life, Society, and Business; A Very Human Future — Enriching Humanity in a Digitized World; The Opportunity at the Edge — Change, Challenge, and Transformation on the Path to 2025, and Aftershocks and Opportunities — Scenarios for a Post-Pandemic Future. His latest book is Aftershocks and Opportunities 2: Navigating the Next Horizon.
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