Investing in Sustainable Adoption or Passing Fads: Hype Cycles, Killer Apps and Web3 Trends

- “If crypto didn’t exist today, we would end up inventing it just to provide the economic rails for AI agents”

- Tokenization of real-world assets will include gaming, in which two-thirds of the global population engages in

- There are tensions between centralized and decentralized developments in web3

AI agents, the tokenization of real-world assets and the transformation of blockchain from a currency use case to a ledger-based ecosystem are trends and applications that are here to stay, according to panelists moderated by Zenobia Godschalk, founder and CEO of ZAG Communications.

“I’d go as far as to say, if crypto didn’t exist today, we would end up inventing it just to provide the economic rails for AI agents,” said Herman Narula, Co-Founder and CEO of Improbable. He added that AI agents are definitely a long-term use case in the space, but the future might hold surprises in terms of applications: rather than financial and industry-focused agents, the personal sphere is in scope that will see AI interacting and engaging with people as friends and even lovers.

“We can already see the massive rise of these types of applications outside the crypto sphere, but it’s only a matter of time before we see applications which combine that with tokens or digital assets. That feels to me like something truly foundational, that is likely to be a big part in the next few years,” Narula said.

Yat Siu, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, Animoca Brands, highlighted “the tokenization of everything” as the trend worth keeping tabs on, noting that tokenization allows to take anything of value and store it on the network, which opens up new paradigms and new areas.

“Tokenization of gaming has actually gone around the world and creates true asset ownership in something that two thirds of the world engage in,” he added.

However, there are still some fundamental problems preventing applications from breaking into the mainstream, such as bad user experience and infrastructure limitations. Lowell Ness, Partner in Perkins Coie’s corporate practice, said that tokenization is a long-term trend that transforms blockchain use cases into a ledger-centric applications from a currency-focused one.

The panel also discussed decentralized social platforms using blockchain technology, as well as the tension between decentralization and centralization comparing what is happening in the web3 ecosystem with the open-source movement.