Each time, at the beginning of an innovation cycle, the first iterations of products and services are naively inspired by the previous cycle. The first automobiles were very much like stagecoaches with a steam engine attached. And so when I talk about the first iteration I often use the metaphor of the "steam stagecoach". Keeping with the automobile theme, the electric car is clearly still at its first iteration, judging from the placement of the charging cap at the same location as the gas cap.

At the beginning of an innovation cycle, the first iterations of products & services are always (naively) inspired by the previous cycle. The first automobiles were very much like stagecoaches with a steam engine attached. NFTs as we see them applied to art, are also only at their first iteration.

Each new version of the Web has offered us its fair share of "steam stagecoaches". In the early days of the Internet, we applied the paper world's concepts to the Web. From daily newspapers to recipe books, everything got digitalized but kept the same shapes. This is how the first online directories came about, as perfect replicas of paper directories. Eventually, search engines replaced them with a more sophisticated version of the search function. 

A few years later, web 2.0 opened the way for collaboration. We used the same concepts from the previous versions of the web but added contribution features, votes and comments. This is how static websites became personal pages with myspace, image galleries became photo sharing sites with Flickr and newspapers became news aggregators with Digg. However, this phase was short-lived and they eventually all turned into "steam coaches". Social networks ended up being the ultimate form of the collaboration function and Myspace became Facebook, Flickr became Instagram and Digg became Twitter. 

In the early 2000s, it was nearly impossible to imagine social networks as a collaboration model, when it seems so obvious today, it is likewise difficult to imagine which models with the advent of web3 will be the ones to benefit from extreme decentralization.

NFTs applied to the world of art, for example, seem to be a primitive if not naive application of the concept. Indeed, if these tokens can take the appearance of an image and act as a certificate of ownership, they have the capacity in reality to represent any type of numerable resources and thus largely exceed the framework of art.

Most of the web3 projects that are flourishing today will turn out to be steam stagecoaches, so the best is yet to come. Stay Tuned!