Real Estate and Crypto / Web3

Dante Alighieri, "The Divine Comedy,"​ is depicted amid views of Florence, heaven, purgatory and hell, Domenico di Michelino, 1465, Duomo.

A thread from Twitter .....

Personally I find Crypto/Web3 exasperating. So much feels fundamentally wrong about it, but what if there is a there there? So one’s mind is filled with trying to understand something that one’s mind is looking at askance and thinking ‘No, or please God no’.

With the nagging thought that far better things to concentrate on are being ignored or downgraded whilst we try and rationalise spending money on ponzi schemes or receipts to things we don’t own.

The problem being that ones own thoughts are irrelevant. If the world moves one way you have no choice but to follow. Which is BTW the argument for Ponzi schemes. We pretend Web3 is about having agency but really none exists. The core driving force IS memes. The power of crowds.

Memes are the aim, and the incentive. Buying a token gives you the incentive to shill that token. That’s the business model. Enlist, or bribe, people to pump and pump. Then dump, presumably.

Alignment of incentives is a good and important thing. But doing so ‘should’ (piety warning) have some better good as the objective. Aligning incentives to sell s**** does not stop s**** being s****.

The counter problem though is one can clearly see how crypto/Web3 DOES enable aligning interests, and coordinating large cohorts, exponentially easier than before. So IF the objective had virtue (piety warning 2) this would be a great toolset.

It’s a real heaven or hell technology. It might be the catalyst for genuine societal uplift at a global level. But it equally could be just about the worst thing mankind has ever pursued.

Meanwhile … back with the day job. What does this mean for real estate? Overall, if crypto/Web3 does develop strongly the impact will be more intense.

Hybrid work is going to prove a disaster for many companies. Largely because their management will not make the necessary, organisational changes to allow it to succeed. But crypto/Web3 will be much more about fully remote working, massively distributed.

In a Web3 world you really can send work anywhere. Location becomes a mere matter of personal taste. I live here because I like it here, not because ‘that’s where the work is’. And that is the default position, not the outlier. One’s work is ALL digital, and therefore ALL ONLINE.

Therefore offices, or indeed any place where work is done, are purely optional and opt-in. You will go there if it pleases you. And has a purpose that online cannot replicate.

TBC this is true regardless going forward. Even if crypto/Web3 turn out to be much ado about nothing, this will still apply. Offices HAVE to make people WANT to go to them. But the degree that this is true will intensify if it isn’t a damp squib.

So we end up really in the same position, vis a vis commercial real estate. The ONLY way forward is to assume your real estate is not needed, and to set about creating the story,the narrative, the desire that makes people WANT it.

From the micro to the macro Cities, towns, venues, places and spaces need to work exceptionally hard to position themselves as desirable. The more Web3 one is the wider geographies, and biz models, one might look at but this is rule number one for ANYWHERE.