Web 3 Series: The Transformative Power of Smart Contracts with Joel Monegro

Joel Monegro (@jmonegro), partner at Placeholder, joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways:

- Every financial asset is a contract between two or more people. The world economy is basically a set of contracts on a ledger.

- A smart contract is like an API, but on-chain, so it can’t be taken down. In many cases, not even the developers can retract a smart contract.

- Value capture and value accrual are two different things — capture is where the value is stored and accrual is where it is going. This is something that is often misunderstood about the fat protocols thesis.

- The best way to think about smart contract networks is as nations. They enforce contracts the way nations do and in Joel’s opinion the ones that are most sovereign are the ones that are most decentralized.

- Over time functionality and performance will come to be similar between networks and it is trust and governance that will differentiate them.

- Joel expects 4-6 very large smart contract networks to emerge.

- The core of decentralized social will be NFTs. The recent NFT craze reminds Joel of the ICO boom of 2017. Many were useless but there were lots of protocols and communities that remained.

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