First she documented the alt-right. Now she’s coming for crypto. Molly White, a veteran Wikipedia editor, is fast becoming the cryptocurrency world’s biggest critic By Gerrit De Vynck May 29, 2022 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/29/molly-white-crypto/ In a strange, animated YouTube video, Cryptoland paints itself as the ultimate utopia, featuring luxurious villas, a casino and a private club, all located on a pristine island in Fiji. Built by and for cryptocurrency enthusiasts, it was looking for investors. To Molly White, the project wasn’t just cringeworthy bluster, it was promotional material for yet another potential scam — one that was targeting the money of real people. Digging into Cryptoland’s organizing documents, she found a business plan full of contradictions and other red flags, like an address in the Seychelles islands, a tax haven which has hosted previous high-profile crypto scams. White unpacked the project in a dashed-off Twitter thread, which went viral, kicking off a wave of criticism and ridicule and spawning copycat videos that boast millions of views. Now, Cryptoland’s website appears inactive, and supporters have abandoned it. Requests for comment to its founders were not answered. A 28-year-old software engineer who writes Wikipedia articles for fun, White is an odd figure to make the crypto industry cower.On her website, “Web3 is Going Just Great,” White documents case after case of crypto malfeasance: investments that turn out to be scams, poorly-run projects that collapse under mismanagement and hacks that drain supporters’ money. As much of the financial and tech elite has rallied around crypto, White has led a small but scrappy group of skeptics pushing the other way whose warnings have seemed vindicated by the cratering in recent weeks of cryptocurrency prices. “Most of my disdain is reserved for the big players who are marketing this to a mainstream audience as though it’s an investment, often promising to be a ticket out of a really tough financial spot for people who don’t have many options,” White said. “It’s very predatory.” To White and her fellow critics, crypto company founders and the venture capitalists backing them are presiding over a massive, unregulated attempt to rid regular people of their money by exaggerating the potential of crypto technology. Years spent online, researching esoteric Internet cultures have made White a rare figure who can maneuver the technically complex, meme-filled world of crypto, translating it into digestible prose. White works from her home in Massachusetts, which she shares with two cats and a 70-pound pandemic puppy. She sports a youthful uniform of jeans, sweaters and Converse sneakers and communicates with her fellow crypto skeptics through Zoom and Twitter direct messages. She’s declined several offers to speak at in-person conferences, citing the time commitment. As more people begin to question cryptomania, White’s prominence has grown: Journalists call her to gut-check stories, and she has lectured for students at Stanford University and provided advice to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on potential crypto legislation. “In the world of cryptocurrency, many things are not what they seem,”said Ben McKenzie, a TV actor and former star in “The O.C.” who began writing about cryptocurrency during the pandemic and has become another one of the industry’s best-known critics. “Molly shines a light through darkness and presents it for the world to see.” White’s targets say her brand of criticism is too cynical, cherry-picking dramatic examples of failure to mischaracterize an entire industry that is mostly full of good people and good ideas. She in turn has been experiencing an uncomfortable form of vindication. “I wasn’t the only crypto skeptic who expected some of these projects to fall apart, but it doesn’t make it fun to watch,” she said. The cryptocurrency world and its boosters are forging on. Mega-investors such as venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which struck big years ago with early investments in Facebook, Skype and Airbnb, have put billions of dollars into the space. The debate over who crypto serves and who will ultimately win is far from over. White’s voice is rising, but the money and power plowing into crypto is, too. #yikes Molly White grew up on the Internet. As a preteen, she began writing and editing Wikipedia pages, first for bands she liked, and then to document unsung women scientists. During the Trump presidency, her interests shifted to right-wing Internet movements and domestic extremism: She edited articles on the brutal online attacks on women gamers and journalists, which came to be known as “GamerGate,” and the “boogaloo" militia movement. In the past 15 years, White’s racked up more than 100,000 edits and served on the organization’s arbitration committee, the high court that settles disputes on the site. So when the term Web3, a catchall for organizations and companies built around cryptocurrency technology, began cropping up on social media in 2021, White started to write a Wikipedia article on it. The task proved harder than she had imagined. “I kept seeing the word everywhere but no one was saying what it meant,” White said, referring to Web3. Billionaire venture capital firms were pouring money into crypto companies, blockchain start-ups were buying Super Bowl ads and tech luminaries such as Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey were hyping up various cryptocurrencies. But White’s research kept bringing her back to one conclusion: Web3 was filled with a litany of scams, failures and frauds meant to separate regular people from their money. The experience inspired her to double down on her blog and social media posts, which she spends several hours a day on, even while she had a full-time software engineer job. (White quit in mid-May but plans to go back to full-time work soon.) She posts to the site constantly, often writing several short dispatches a day. They’re written in a deadpan, straightforward style, with a few snarky flourishes: hashtags that categorize each post include “#badidea,” “#hmm” and “#yikes.” The site’s header features an image of the Earth erupting in flames with a crying “Bored Ape” — a hugely popular cartoon avatar for crypto fans — looking on. The bottom-right corner adds up the money lost in the scams and hacks she’s documented. By mid-May, it was nearing $10 billion. White said she’s been skeptical of the industry for years, but hadn’t paid too much attention because most of those losing their money to hacks and scams were tech-savvy and wealthy. That’s changed. “People are putting in money that they can’t afford to lose,” White said. “They thought this might be their ticket out of poverty or they can finally stop working that minimum wage job and then all their savings are gone.” That reality has only deepened as the total value of cryptocurrencies tracked by crypto data company CoinGecko fell to around $1.3 trillion, from its high in November of nearly $3 trillion. Crypto forums on Reddit are awash in stories of people losing their life savings after investing in high-profile crypto coins and projects. Many of the posts on White’s website focus on projects that target middle-class investors looking for a way to trade their way into a new level of financial freedom. In longer posts, she untangles the devilishly complicated structures that prop up most crypto companies and initiatives, such as Axie Infinity, a business that allowed people, many in the Philippines, to make money by playing a crypto-based video game. News articles had been written extolling the company as a way for people to quit their jobs and make money. Then the company was hacked, and thousands of people cumulatively lost around $620 million. “We’re seeing more and more incidents like this one, where it’s not just someone losing some extra cash that they decided to take a risk on, but people losing the money that they need to live,” White wrote at the time. Other crypto skeptics have produced deep, insightful critiques of the field. Moxie Marlinspike, founder of the messaging app Signal, wrote a 4,000-word essay in January laying out his concerns with Web3. A two-hour and 18-minute video from YouTuber Dan Olson about the issues with crypto-based art went viral and has scored over 7 million views. But White’s “snackable” daily posts about the crypto “clown car parade” has made a skeptical critique of the industry accessible to those who don’t have the time or attention span for a deep-dive, said Andrew Lih, a Wikipedia administrator and writer of “The Wikipedia Revolution.” He has known White since she was a teenage Wikipedia contributor. “That’s what’s so great about her. She is like, ‘I’m not going to club you over the head with it. Just you read this conveyor belt of ridiculousness and draw your own conclusions.’ And I think that’s been the strength of her blog,” Lih said. From fringe to front page Until the pandemic, cryptocurrency was a relatively fringe technology, with bitcoin gaining popularity in the early 2010s as a way to buy illegal drugs on online black markets, such as Silk Road. Cryptocurrency’s core innovation, the blockchain, a record of transactions that can run without a centralized authority, such as a bank or government, has been hailed by libertarians, opposition groups in authoritarian countries and open Internet advocates as a way to potentially remove oppressive middlemen from human relations. It isn’t fringe anymore. Prices for cryptocurrencies skyrocketed during lockdowns, turning early investors into millionaires overnight and spurring a wave of interest from people who were worried about missing out on a tantalizing new tool for generating wealth. The stock-trading tool Robinhood and crypto firms such as Coinbase alike built apps that made buying and selling cryptocurrency as easy as swiping on Tinder. Crypto companies launched massive marketing blitzes, spending millions on Super Bowl ads and paying for celebrity endorsements from Matt Damon, Kim Kardashian and Tom Brady. Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, a special kind of crypto technology that connotes ownership of a digital image, video or song, broadened the industry’s appeal by bringing in artists, marketers and musicians. A digital artist named Beeple sold one for $69 million. Almost 90 percent of Americans have heard about cryptocurrency and 16 percent say they have invested in or used one, according to a November 2021 Pew Research study. White and her fellow skeptics say the traditional media has mishandled the story, treating bitcoin as an exciting innovation while underplaying the idea it could be a giant pyramid scheme. Crypto-focused publications tend to have ties to the industry, while financial news organizations treat it like an asset class. “The crypto industry has benefited from the siloing of journalism,” McKenzie said. “You have to step back much broader and get outside the industry to get some perspective on what might be going on inside it.” Today, the battle lines over crypto are clear. Proponents see it as a world-changing technology that could have as big of an impact on society as the printing press or trans-Atlantic travel. Critics say these utopian dreams obscure a much darker reality. Despite her growing following, White is still an outlier among the wealthy, more powerful investors and entrepreneurs who have gone all-in on crypto. She often hears from people who are angry, accusing her of spreading “FUD,” or fear, uncertainty and doubt. She’s been called names and told “have fun staying poor.” White takes it all in stride. “No one likes to read bad things about themselves, but I think I’ve also been around on the Internet long enough to see that that’s just what people do. People are nasty online,” she said. And though she doesn’t pull punches when going after venture capitalists and powerful people pushing crypto investments, she said it doesn’t help to bully regular people who are enthusiastic about the technology’s potential or have lost money on it. “Some people get a lot of joy in seeing average people who’ve bought in to crypto losing money,” she said. “I can understand the impulse given the crypto-shilling and toxicity from a lot of people in the space, but I think a lot of people were also convinced to buy in based on false promises.” washingtonpost.com © 1996-2022 The Washington Post
‘Shameless’: The murky world of celebrity crypto influencers By David Yaffe-Bellany June 1, 2022 https://www.smh.com.au/business/mar...brity-crypto-influencers-20220531-p5apsw.html Logan Paul had a message for his 6 million Twitter followers: He was “all in” on a new cryptocurrency called Dink Doink. According to the project’s creator, Dink Doink investors would receive shares of a cartoon character, entitling them to a portion of the proceeds if the googly-eyed figure ever appeared in a TV show or movie. Last June, Paul, a 27-year-old boxer and social-media influencer, praised Dink Doink on Twitter and in a public Telegram chat, before endorsing it again on his podcast, “Impaulsive.” Logan Paul, a 27-year-old boxer and social-media influencer, has admitted he failed to disclose personal or financial ties to projects advertised on his feed, a potential violation of federal marketing regulations.Credit:Sinna Nasseri/The New York Times But by mid-July, the price of Dink Doink had plummeted to a fraction of a cent, and Paul was facing an online backlash. In his endorsements, he had failed to mention some relevant information: He and the project’s creator were friends, and they had come up with the idea for the cryptocurrency together. He had also received a large allocation of Dink Doink coins when it launched. “I don’t know what went absurdly wrong,” Paul said in an interview. “That’s the project from hell, and I just wiped my hands of that.” The collapse in crypto prices this month has renewed scrutiny of the celebrity marketers who sell virtual currencies to the masses. Over the last year, actor Matt Damon and comedian Larry David have starred in high-profile TV commercials for crypto platforms, trumpeting digital assets as an unmissable moneymaking opportunity. Those ads drew criticism from crypto sceptics, but they were tied to mainstream companies with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. A far seedier form of crypto promotion has flourished on social media, rife with undisclosed conflicts of interest and exaggerated claims about skyrocketing profits. Celebrity influencers like Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather have made millions of dollars endorsing specific and often dubious crypto investments, urging fans to buy obscure coins that quickly crashed in value, or shilling little-known collections of nonfungible tokens, the unique digital files known as NFTs. In some cases, promoters like Paul have admitted that they failed to disclose personal or financial ties to projects advertised on their feeds, a potential violation of federal marketing regulations. And even before the crypto market’s recent downturn, a series of these influencer-backed ventures had crashed spectacularly, hurting amateur traders and prompting lawsuits that could force some celebrities to compensate investors for their losses. “You have this shameless profiteering from celebrities and others, who aren’t at all disinterested or impartial,” said John Reed Stark, a former chief of the internet enforcement branch at the Securities and Exchange Commission. “There is a lot of potential for harm.” Crypto entrepreneurs hire influencers to push up the value of their digital currencies, hoping to ignite the sort of online hype that briefly turned Dogecoin, a joke currency based on a meme, into one of the most valuable crypto investments. Some promoters are not well known outside crypto circles but have large followings on social media, where they broadcast market tips, interspersed with sponsored content. Others are major celebrities like Kardashian, who is facing a lawsuit from investors over her marketing of an obscure cryptocurrency called EthereumMax. Celebrity influencers like Kim Kardashian have made millions of dollars endorsing specific and often dubious crypto investments, urging fans to buy obscure coins that quickly crashed in value.Credit:Hunter Abrams/The New York Times The amounts paid to crypto promoters can be astronomical. An NFT project called Hive Investments has been recruiting influencers, offering payments as large as $US400,000 ($556,000), according to a presentation reviewed by The New York Times. Jordan Belfort, the former stockbroker whose memoir inspired the 2013 movie The Wolf of Wall Street, was once offered $US250,000 to change his Twitter profile picture to an NFT. Belfort, who recently rebranded himself as a crypto guru, turned down the offer. “We don’t want to be a part of things that basically exist purely to separate people from their money,” said Matt Hirschberg, Belfort’s business partner. “I’ve had people offer us guarantees of up to at least $US10 million just to get involved.” Crypto promotion occupies a legal gray area. Under federal law, people marketing securities are required to publicly disclose payments for promotions. In 2018, Mayweather paid more than $US600,000 to settle SEC charges that he had failed to properly disclose his compensation for marketing initial coin offerings, the crypto equivalent of an initial public offering on Wall Street. But the rule he broke applies only to securities, like stock in a company, and it is unclear which crypto products meet that legal standard. “You have this shameless profiteering from celebrities and others, who aren’t at all disinterested or impartial. There is a lot of potential for harm.” John Reed Stark, a former chief of the internet enforcement branch at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Crypto promoters could also run afoul of the Federal Trade Commission’s rules, which require marketers of all kinds to disclose when they have a financial stake in the projects they endorse. “Companies and the social media influencers of the world view this as the Wild West,” said David Klein, a lawyer in New York who specialises in marketing rules. “The old-world laws still apply, and you have to follow the guidelines. Otherwise, the regulators will come calling.” Even celebrities who disclose crypto payments have found themselves in legal trouble. Last summer, Kardashian endorsed EthereumMax in an Instagram post with a brief disclaimer at the bottom: “#ad.” Few crypto insiders had heard of EthereumMax, which is different from Ethereum, one of the most popular crypto platforms. Lionel Laurent The promotion led to a surge of trading, but EthereumMax’s price soon collapsed. This year, nine traders who had bought EthereumMax sued Kardashian, the project’s founders and other promoters, including Mayweather and former basketball star Paul Pierce, accusing them of disguising their control over EthereumMax tokens and circulating “misleading” advertisements. According to the lawsuit, Pierce received more than 15 trillion EthereumMax tokens in exchange for tweets endorsing the coin. None of the tweets excerpted in the lawsuit mentioned a business relationship with the token’s creators. Shortly after promoting the project, the lawsuit claimed, Pierce sold his tokens — an apparent “pump and dump” operation in which he profited by encouraging fans to buy the tokens, before selling his own holdings at a higher price. A lawyer for Kardashian said the suit’s allegations “lack merit.” Mayweather, Pierce and the project’s founders did not respond to requests for comment. As crypto prices have crashed, investors have also turned on lower-profile influencers who post sponsored content on social media. Ben Armstrong, a crypto influencer with almost 1 million Twitter followers, runs a YouTube channel where he discusses market trends and talks up his favourite projects. He used to charge startup founders $US40,000 for a YouTube interview, but discontinued the service this year after his price sheet was posted publicly by an influential crypto sleuth. Jordan Belfort, the “Wolf of Wall Street” has rebranded himself as a crypto expert.Credit:Scott McIntyre/The New York Times Some of the projects that Armstrong promoted were small-time, experimental crypto ventures that eventually encountered problems. In those cases, he said, he considered himself a victim, too. “They’re preying on the novice crypto influencer who just got popular and is trying to figure out what they should and shouldn’t be doing,” he said. “It’s hard to go from 12,000 followers to a million in one year and make all the right decisions.” Not long after Dink Doink’s crash, Paul started an NFT collection called CryptoZoo, which was widely mocked for featuring stock images of animals. Paul blamed the staff who helped run the project for CryptoZoo’s problems. Now, he’s working with a new team on a crypto venture called Liquid Marketplace, which uses blockchain technology to let investors buy fractions of physical objects. The recent crypto crash “will definitely weed out the weak,” Paul said. But he added that it had also made him rethink some of his promotions, after he personally lost $US750,000. “I don’t want anyone to feel like they’ve been screwed because of any sort of move they’ve made because of me,” he said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/ent...-thinks-crypto-is-a-scam-20220601-p5aq66.html ‘Parasitic’: Why the founder of Dogecoin thinks crypto is a scam By Dominic Powell June 2, 2022 Having founded one of the most popular and valuable crypto projects - meme currency Dogecoin - you might not expect Australian software engineer Jackson Palmer to be one of the industry’s harshest critics. But Palmer is unequivocal in his criticism and has been for some time, having exited the crypto space in 2016 and denouncing it as exploitative. Meanwhile, Dogecoin has continued to grow, hitting a market capitalisation of $15 billion and attracting the support of the world’s richest man Elon Musk. Dogecoin founder Jackson Palmer is now one of cryptocurrency’s most prominent critics. These days, Palmer has - in a sense - reentered the fray, launching a new podcast called Griftonomics which he hopes will shine a light on new-age scams and rorts - of which he believes crypto is one of the worst offenders. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald spoke to Palmer for our new weekly series You, Me and Web3, which aims to examine, challenge and demystify the ideas behind the emerging industry by speaking to the people who live and breathe it. How did you go from starting Dogecoin to making a podcast about grifts? When I made Dogecoin, I was already a very sceptical person, and it was created as a joke to make fun of crypto. But it happened to coincide with a unique period of time when crypto was having its first big run-up. And, as a result, I got quickly enveloped in the ecosystem. So, I decided I’d give it the benefit of the doubt, thinking: surely everybody in this space can’t be terrible. And I tried that for the good part of a year, and I made many friends in the crypto space, but having to deal with all the crap going on with Dogecoin and the community, I was quickly shocked back to reality. My scepticism was entirely warranted. In 2016, I quit crypto and didn’t do anything in the space for a good two or three years until the next run-up in 2017/2018. And I had so many people asking me about it, so I decided to make an educational YouTube channel to inform people, and that went pretty well, I think I racked up around 30,000 subscribers. But, again, I quickly realised there were channels out there promoting things like ‘how to get 10x on your investment’ that were getting hundreds of thousands more views than mine, so I was like, what am I doing this for? So, in 2019 I deleted all of my social media and stayed away. Last year, I bought the domain name for Griftonomics. And as I was about to start recording the first episode I was like, why? Why am I putting myself through this again? So I walked away for another year, and part of me thought in that time some of this stuff might implode, but it hasn’t. If anything, there are more scams than there was a year ago. And so, in the last few weeks, I decided it was time to get back into it. Dogecoin, founded by Palmer, is a joke cryptocurrency that is currently the 10th largest crypto with a market capitalisation of $15 billion.Credit:Getty In the grand scheme of grifts, where do you think crypto falls? When I set out to do Griftonomics, I wanted the series to be mostly about things that weren’t crypto-related, like hustle culture, online gambling, carbon credits, things like that. But the interesting thing about crypto is, as you start to scratch the surface of the things I just mentioned, in every topic, you find a crypto angle. There is some way that this parasitic thing has got its claws in every single kind of scam that is out there. It’s a facilitating technology. Crypto acts as an enabler of many groups of scams by providing an unregulated, harder to control system for scammers to perpetuate their scams. Wherever there’s smoke there’s probably crypto. So if it is such a scam, why are so many people drawn to it? Crypto has this narrative attached to it that exploits the fears or the situations that the average person finds themselves in, and grifters have used this to sell people on the idea of crypto, that it’s some sort of cutting edge new technology. And this puts people in this situation where they’re like ‘oh, there’s this crazy way that I can make a bunch of money, and it’s some whiz-bang technology that celebrities and billionaires thinks is good, so it must be great’. And that’s the closer. ‘When Matt Damon gets up at the Superbowl and tells you that apes will be the future, some people then think ‘oh well, maybe I was wrong’.′ Dogecoin founder Jackson Palmer on crypto Every two or three years there’s a new narrative. In 2009, it was that Bitcoin was going to replace all these banks that just screwed you over. Then a few years later when that didn’t work out, the narrative was that it was just a store of value. Then it pivoted again to ICOs [Initial Coin Offerings], democratising fundraising, and then recently we went through the DeFi [Decentralised Finance] narrative, which was just a total sham. Now we have NFTs [Non-Fungible Tokens], which are simply the latest in a long string of changing narratives, so the industry can get a bunch of new suckers in. I, for one, am completely shocked that some expensive pictures of apes might actually be a scam. [laughs]. That’s the thing - I think many people suspend their disbelief when it comes to things like that. If you went back five years and people were telling you JPEGs of apes were selling for a million dollars, people would have laughed at you. But the problem is it has been legitimised by its promoters who are putting money in the pockets of celebrities or politicians to legitimise it. When Matt Damon gets up at the Superbowl and tells you that apes will be the future, some people then think ‘oh well, maybe I was wrong’. How much do you think that sort of Elon Musk factor plays into it? When the world’s richest man is on Twitter talking about crypto, does that further legitimise the space? Elon has had a big impact, especially on the Dogecoin market and making people believe that it is something, which I obviously don’t agree with. But it’s not just Elon, I think it is also various large names like Marc Andreessen, Mark Cuban, and several other big names in investment that are heavily on the crypto train and probably carry just as much, if not more, influence than Elon Musk. If you go and look at the people who were involved with Y Combinator or 500 Startups 10 years ago, I pretty much guarantee they’re all running a crypto venture fund right now. And some of them are pumping millions, if not billions of dollars into trying to legitimise this stuff. In your view, is any part of the Web3 space legitimate? Could any of it stick around and actually be useful? Not really. I think it’s a hammer in search of a nail, and it doesn’t provide much value back to society in any meaningful way. I’m a huge proponent of decentralisation, I had a person on the podcast who was the creator of Mastodon, a decentralised social network a lot like Twitter. Does it need a blockchain? Does it need cryptocurrency to function? Absolutely not. And the same can be said of so many peer-to-peer protocols. What crypto does is play on the incentives of gaining adoption through making the product something people can speculate on, and that undermines a lot of its ability to service many of these use cases. I think it’s very telling that the people who are seemingly most involved in, pouring the most money in and exerting the most power over cryptocurrency right now are the same people who destroyed the economy in 2008, the same people who are billionaires in the real world.
Investing in supertrends Web3 is in chaos and metaverses are in their own walled gardens, says Randi Zuckerberg Published Thu, Aug 18 2022 Goh Chiew Tong@ChiewTong_G https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/18/web3-is-in-chaos-metaverses-in-walled-gardens-randi-zuckerberg.html Key Points A smooth and “complete decentralization” of Web3 is not yet a reality, said Randi Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media and the sister of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “In order to really unlock the potential [of Web3], we’re going to need to figure out a system where there’s interoperability,” she added. “There needs to be more protections for consumers … I think we will wind up [with] web 2.7, where there is some centralization, keeping people safe, but the ability to port your assets with you to any site,” she said. “We’re really just scratching the surface of what we’re going to see [in the metaverse],” said Randi Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media. Wildpixel | Istock | Getty Images A smooth and “complete decentralization” of Web3 is not yet a reality, said Randi Zuckerberg, referring to a system in which users rather than companies have ownership of services and data. The sister of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was speaking at the Global Supertrends Conference 2022 on Wednesday. The Web3 is a hypothetical, future version of the internet based on blockchain technology — an “ideal utopia,” said Zuckerberg. “But … that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening in reality, is chaos.” Crypto enthusiasts want to remake the internet with ‘Web3.’ Here’s what it means The founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, a production company and marketing consultancy, added, “You’re the only one watching your own back and your own assets, people are spending time protecting themselves by setting up so many different wallets and protecting their identity and that’s not contributing to development in the area.” Zuckerberg, who was an early employee at Meta — formerly known as Facebook — explained that various metaverses are now acting as “their own walled garden,” in which users are unable to use their assets across platforms. The metaverse can be loosely defined as a virtual world where people live, work and play. With cryptocurrency, users can buy and develop virtual land or dress their own avatars. What is the metaverse and why are billions of dollars being spent on it? “Right now, I’m on Decentraland, my son is on Roblox, my other son is on Fortnite. That’s great — we’re all in the metaverse. [But] we have no interaction with one another,” she said. “In order to really unlock the potential [of Web3], we’re going to need to figure out a system where there’s interoperability. What you have goes with you wherever you are, [and] we’re not there yet,” Zuckerberg added. Going mainstream However, according to Zuckerberg, that’s easier said than done because no company running a metaverse right now wants to give up control or “share that ownership.” “That’s why it’s not we’re not seeing that kind of consumer mainstream adoption yet because there needs to be a world where you leave the house with one wallet. And you need to see that same behavior online also.” She added that Web3 needs experts who have been involved in the global banking system and Web2 — the internet that we know today — to lend a “protective layer.” What is Web3? We ask the man who invented the word. The need for such experts is all the more important because it has been “too easy” for users to be scammed or lose all their assets in Web3, said Zuckerberg. “There needs to be more protections for consumers … I think we will wind up [with] web 2.7, where there is some centralization, keeping people safe, but the ability to port your assets with you to any site.” Another thing that needs to be improvedin Web3 is user-friendliness, she added. “It should not take 45 steps to set up a cryptocurrency wallet, buy a currency and enter the metaverse. It needs to [be] one-stop, beginner-friendly.” real estate will be “extremely valuable. “Wherever there’s scarcity … there’s value. I think the big question will just be, is there scarcity in the metaverse and if there is, there will be value in real estate there,” she added. According to data from MetaMetrics Solutions, real estate sales in the metaverse surpassed $500 million in 2021 and could double in 2022. Zuckerberg said that education and training will be another “huge area” for opportunities and revenue. “Especially in this new age where workers are remote, it is very difficult to upskill remote workers … I think training in the metaverse, education in an interactive way, is going to become crucial for every business that has a remote work,” she added. “We’re really just scratching the surface of what we’re going to see.”