Mass adoption and Web3 future: Day 1 of Binance Blockchain Week 2022

The attitude of crypto after mass adoption, developing a Web3, future of crypto and non-crypto blockchains. These and other hot topics were discussed by the leading industry speakers on Day 1 of Binance Blockchain Week 2022, which is taking place in Dubai from 28 to 30 March 2022.

The annual Binance Blockchain Week involves the brightest and most influential minds in the blockchain ecosystem and beyond for three days of various panels, fireside chat sessions and thought-provoking keynotes available via live streaming.

Day 1 of the event started with the opening keynote of His Excellency Helal Al Marri, the Director General of Dubai’s Department of Economy and Tourism, and the Dubai World Trade Centre Authority (DWTCA).

“This forum definitely represents the next connector: Digital, open, secure,” he said, addressing the audience of the conference gathered in the Dubai World Trade Centre.

His Excellency also emphasized the importance of regulators and governments in enabling the right ecosystems for innovation to flourish and to always foster new ideas and new ways of empowering people.

The question of global blockchain adoption was a central question on the first panel by Tim Grant, Head of EMEA at Galaxy Digital Holdings and Richard Teng, Regional Head of MENA Binance, who discussed what key industry stakeholders could do to move the sector forward.

“We should educate them to bring them ahead of the curve,” Richard Teng said.

He mentioned that a key point to note was that policy-makers in the traditional regulatory landscape are being increasingly more prudent in approaching blockchain. That’s why a delicate balance needed to uphold while building the foundation for massive adoption.

Richard expressed the hope that regulators dedicate more resources to exploring the potential of the space, understanding on-chain surveillance, compliance monitoring, and other ways blockchain can help enforce security, more barriers to blockchain adoption can be knocked down.

“We’ve got so much evolution left to get to,” Tim Grant added.

In his words, beyond the use case of CBDCs, blockchain technology, as compared to cryptocurrency, is poised to disrupt more industries. With the world sitting up and taking note of the potential of crypto and blockchain, it’s likely that more people will be trained in analyzing the subtleties of the latest technologies and consensus mechanisms, optimizing tokenomics and pushing the known boundaries of what crypto and blockchain can do now.

The event then continued with a keynote speech by Soo-Man Lee, Founder & Chief Producer of SM Entertainment, Asia’s leading entertainment company.

“We plan to inspire human’s instinct to create through the play-to-create model, so that anyone can make killer content and receive incentivisation,” he said.

According to Lee Soo Man, anyone can discover their capacity as a creator through the SM Metaverse. You could take part in a world where you can create songs, dance routines, fan art and more for SM artists.

SMCU (SM Culture Universe), a virtual destination where fans and artists converge, will use a Play-to-Create ecosystem to encourage creation by rewarding creators. Within the P2C ecosystem, user-created content can be converted into NFTs, allowing users to earn profits and gain recognition for their creations.

Ending his keynote, Lee Soo Man shared his dream with viewers of Binance Blockchain Week, and fans of KPOP all over the world: “My vision is this: If you want to create songs or dances for SM artists, you can do it through the SM Metaverse.”

In the next panel, Charles Hoskinson, CEO and Founder of IOHK, expressed the founding principles of Bitcoin and what a future powered by crypto and the blockchain would look like.

“Each and everyone has the same access (to crypto) as the most powerful amongst us,” said Charles. And he believes that what’s at stake is not just the user’s crypto.

It’s everything that we think we own and interact with, including our identity. With blockchain as the sandbox for building a decentralized ecosystem, perhaps other aspects of our lives will in time be impacted in the same way.

“I believe the future will be decentralized,” he summarized the ethos.

Further, Bruce Pon, Founder of Ocean Protocol, Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon and Jagdeep Sidhu, Co-Founder & CTO of Blockchain Foundry (SYScoin), sought to answer what the journey from Web2 to Web3 does look like.

“You are the true owners in a web 3.0 world,” Sandeep Nailwal said.

It seemed evident that incentivization and user experience are key to mass adoption of Web3. More than technology itself, the benefits of participating in Web3 need to be made known.

Meanwhile, Bruce Pon noted that one draw of Web3 is being able to introduce value to things that we couldn’t before.

Per Jagdeep Sidhu, the industry is still working on solving issues like scalability and standardization of Web3.

Regarding a time frame, it’s all speculative, but 2 to 3 years is the earliest before we see any noticeable changes.

The closing panel was marked by a keynote speech by Eowyn Chen, CEO of Trust Wallet.

How can we empower crypto users to ready them for Web3? For Eowyn Chen, the answer to that question lies in a mix of technology, methodology and hope.

“Users should pass through us (wallets) as seamlessly as possible to get to the fun part, web 3.0,” she said.

The key, for Eowyn, is to use the nexus of the wallet as a vector to enable key improvements. In particular, an open-source wallet that is transparent, available to all and truly consumer-first.

Another key element is to offer tools and educational resources to both users and developers.

At the end of the day, what form Web3 will truly take is still very much a work in progress, and it will take an effort from across the ecosystem to codify this new paradigm, one that could truly be a force for good.

Blockchain Binance Week 2022 is taking place in Dubai from 28 to 30 March 2022.