I think sometimes we easily forget about Moore’s law, the pace of change will only get exponentially faster. If we thought the last two years have brought massive change to the way we live, this year will be wild in terms of adoption of new technologies. I’m sure you heard a lot about NFT’s last year, and if you were one of the few that didn’t, you will for sure this year, now that Neymar, Eminem and Justin Bieber have bought Bored Apes.

Well, something that’s bigger by an order of magnitude and that you will start hearing this year is Web3 and how this is going to change the way we think about the internet. We are living in an amazing moment in time, so many things have been democratized. As long as we have access to the internet, we have all of the world’s information in our hands. But Web2, the current centralized version of the internet, is owned by a handful of massive corporations that retain control the rails of the web and all of our data, profiting from it, but not sharing those profits.

So to put it simply:

Web1: Read

Web2: Read, Write

Web3: Read, Write, Own

But here comes Web3, the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens according to Packy McCormick. Web3 is about trust, it’s a P2P (peer to peer) network, and with trust comes ownership. Web3 matters because we are building an internet owned by people instead of large corporations like Google or FB. This way, people can finally own an upside of their data or their work.

So in this new iteration of the web, which combines participation and ownership, users buy or are paid for participating in tokens, which confer both participation rights and ownership rights. Web3 is built on top of crypto-economic networks, these combine the best features of the first internet eras: community-governed, decentralized networks with capabilities that will eventually exceed those of the most centralized services according to Chris Dixon.

And this basically starts with Bitcoin and for me, its most important innovation, the blockchain. In 2009, Bitcoin introduced a peer-to-peer system for transferring value across the Internet. The Bitcoin blockchain is what makes it possible for transactions to be made in a decentralized, trust-less way—all while avoiding the so-called double-spend problem—preventing transactions from being fraudulently copied and duplicated digitally, thus every transaction gets recorded on ledgers that we can all verify. You can read Satoshi’s whitepaper here.

The most straightforward description of blockchain I’ve read is that it’s a linked list of transactions stored in a network of computers. Blockchains are decentralized, meaning that transactions are on a network of computers (nodes), and they are open, meaning that those transactions can be viewed by anyone. So this brings us back to what web3 is all about, decentralization.

The blockchain is an amazing invention, however the problem is that Bitcoin’s blockchain is only useful for transacting bitcoins, while the concept of a decentralized ledger could be extremely useful for millions of other applications we haven’t even figured out yet. That’s where Vitalik Buterin’s creation, Ethereum, became so revolutionary. Ethereum’s goal is to become the world’s decentralized computer.

On top of having it’s own crypto currency, Ether, Ethereum widely adopted smart contracts, a concept first proposed by NIck Szabo in 1994. Smart contracts are decentralized code that runs when predetermined conditions are met. Typically used to automate the execution of an agreement without the need of an intermediary.

So with these ideas of ownership, we can tokenize almost any asset or service, represent it and store it on a blockchain. Tokens align and incentivize network participants to work together toward a common goal, the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token. You can read more about social tokens here .

Tokens give users property rights: the ability to own a piece of the internet. And probably one of the most hyped types of tokens right now are NFT’s (Non fungible tokens). A year ago, 99.9% of us had never heard the letters NFT next to each other. Now, $3.5B worth of NFTs have traded hands on OpenSea alone in the first two weeks of January.

But NFT’s are just a building block, it has been a way to onboard people into crypto, into digital and online ownership and into transacting on blockchain. The next step is the formation of DAOs. DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations, which are groups organized around a mission that coordinate through a shared set of rules enforced on a blockchain. DAO’s are about reclaiming our ability to make collective decisions without the need of a third party. There are some very exciting DAO’s coming up, like City DAO .

And finally this brings us to real estate. Real estate is one of the largest asset classes worldwide in terms of market capitalization, but the industry is one of the most antiquated ones and it’s lack of innovation has led to seismic affordability issues, i.e. ownership is not open to all members of society.

The way that we have managed assets up to today usually involves complex legal agreements, and large teams of people to deal with tons of paperwork, making it very difficult to track and transfer ownership. Tokenization offers a radical new way of thinking about asset ownership and management.

Smart contracts have the potential to facilitate rights management in the real estate industry, as once ownership is tokenized, it can easily be registered and managed on a blockchain, making it more easily traded P2P, dramatically lowering the barriers of entry to real estate ownership.

For example, Web3 based land registries, which multiple cities are already working on, could minimize bureaucracy and reduce market friction and the costs involved in the transfer of ownership. Imagine a world without escrow, Vitalik wrote an interesting white paper on this, crypto cities. Housing thus, becomes part of a network, fungible and more flexible.

As we have mentioned before, web3 is by its users for its users, it’s about trust and about ownership. Web3 allows for online communities to reclaim sovereignty over the virtual world and DAO’s will let us reclaim sovereignty over our built world. This is the way we view housing3. DAO’s where we collectively buy, manage and operate a built environment under our rules and for our benefit, making real estate ownership, and all its benefits, accessible to a larger portion of society.