POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Power is going to the people, not organizations. The year 2021 is a turning point where grassroots movements, shaped and organized by new technologies, have fundamentally changed politics, technology, and society. Forget the debate about what to call it. Web3? Populism? It doesn’t really matter. It all revolves around giving more power to more people. The battle for the next fifteen years in tech, in politics, in media, and everything else is in terms of how much power is actually and authentically distributed to the people.
RISE OF CRYPTO CITIES
Crypto financing for state and local governments is desperately needed at a time of massive deficits, inflation, and continued political divisiveness. Getting government financing on-chain means that the public can better track the long term fiscal planning and financing of a government, creating new portals for combatting waste, fraud, and abuse. City coins could also be the basis for new revenue streams for the government, completely reimagining municipal financing and investing. The idea is already underway in Miami with MiamiCoins, and it will be expanded to other major cities in 2022.
NFT ARMORIES
NFTs are great. NFT custody is not. It’s still super clunky and unnecessarily scary for serious NFT collectors to safely secure their NFT assets. The major wallet providers will innovate in this space in 2022, but another super interesting idea that was posited here and is starting to take hold: NFT armories. Just like how traditional art is collected, transacted, and safely secured in international freeports, policymakers and founders are working to provide a similar type of service to serious NFT collectors. Countries like Singapore have started to provide this freeport service, and more countries will continue exploring NFT armories in the year ahead.
POLITICS IN THE METAVERSE
Think about what Facebook has done to American politics, and add kerosine. If and when the metaverse takes shape with people living more and more of their lives online, the less the physical world will matter. That applies to politics too. The metaverse is the next space race for nations, laws, customs, and who we want to associate. The great unbundling of our social fabric is underway. The question is whether the metaverse will numb our real-life animosity towards one another, or accelerate that division and partisanship. Buckle up.
THE DECLINE OF STARTUPS
VC-backed startups aren’t what they used to be in DC. During the Obama Administration, high-flying startups were a rare place of bipartisan support and admiration. Fast forward to 2021 and the recent battles over the qualified small business stock is symptomatic of a wider skepticism towards tech startups. Silicon Valley saw the first glimpse of this during the CARES Act and the failure to secure clear eligibility for small business loans, but it has only gotten worse since. Everyone gets the Big Tech backlash. But few see the troubling signs ahead in DC for even traditional tech startups and startup capital financing.
REMOTE WORK INFRASTRUCTURE
The overlooked opportunity from the infrastructure bill is the massive growth that lies ahead for broadband network deployments in the coming years. This is critically important for the promise of a more fully remote workforce in America. Remember, remote work does not just mean a full-stack engineer from Indiana can now compete with someone who codes in a Brooklyn coffee shop. It means someone in Brooklyn may also have to compete with a coder living in Bangkok, where, by the way, they have some of the fastest internet in the world. Poor broadband access will become the digital equivalent of not having a reliable car to get to work everyday. Broadband access is vital to remote work.
WHAT’S AHEAD: MASSIVE GEOPOLITICAL RISK
The fall of Afghanistan, the Beijing Olympics, and the ongoing threats from Russia and Iran all point to a massive geopolitical risk in the future. The United States will have to scramble to upgrade and adjust to the new world order. That means upgrading and adjusting how America invests in its military, including: surveillance technology, data encryption and security, autonomous weaponry, drones, robotics, AI, and enterprise IT. Forgot about climate change and crypto; in 2022, the most contrarian of VC bets is investing in defense tech.