Been waiting for. To hear from alex tapscott, the bestselling author himself. Im pleased to introduce him. Alex is an entrepreneur, a business author, a seasoned Capital Markets professional, focused the impact of emerging technologies such as blockchain and cryptocurrency, business, government and, society. Alex has been also the coauthor of, critically acclaimed nonfiction bestseller blockchain revolution, which i mentioned earlier. It was really a life book for me that changed the trajectory. My career and really my life. It has been translated into more than 19 languages and it has sold more than half a million copies worldwide. His other books include Financial Services, revolution 2020 Digital Assets 2022. Alex a sought after for his expertise, business and government audiences. He has delivered well over 200 lectures. Executive to business audiences at firms, goldman sachs, google alliance, ibm, microsoft, accenture, just to name a few. Alexs tedx talk, which is fantastic if you havent seen it, although many have actually over 800,000. Its called blockchain is eating whilst wall street and its been featured in the new york times, Harvard Business review, globe and mail, the national post, fortune and many other publications. His current book, web three charting the internets next economic and cultural frontier, has become an international bestseller, and the wall street journal and, the globe and mail. In 2017, alex, the Blockchain Research institute bry, a Global Think Tank investigating blockchain strategy opportunities and use. Alex is a graduate of Amherst College cum laude and a cfa charterholder. He lives in toronto with his beautiful family. Everyone please me. Welcome alex tapscott. Well, you all. This wonderful audience and i have to say i am extremely humbled and quite touched by the introduction from elizabeth and from john as well as a proud canadian. You know, i try to do my best when representing our country overseas. This book tour has been an amazing journey. This is actually the last stop number, 13 and somehow i havent gotten tired of delivering this talk. You guys are in luck, but it wouldnt have been without the tremendous of a very Impressive Group of and countless really partners in every city. And weve already heard about the community locally. But i do want to just give one more shoutout both to our sponsors and also to the government of canada who in many of these different locations has been a terrific partner in helping bring in community partners, bring in and help to make these events a huge success. This is a really exciting time in Human History, and im so i feel so fortunate to be with you all today to tell you a little bit about this story every once in a while, a new technology emerges, transforms the economy, power grid and the old order of Human Affairs in ways that are both profound and often quite unexpected. And weve seen this play time and time again throughout. History most recently with the internet, before that, with the computer, you know, the inventor of the transistor and before that the television, the radio, electricity, the steam engine really all the way back to the printing. And now were in this very interesting period where theres not one new technology, but four and theyre all emerging or least theyre all hitting their stride at exactly same moment. And i think each of these technologies has the potential to as impactful and potentially disruptive as any that have come before the first of these technologies is. Blockchain not exactly most sonorous word, but nevertheless a very Technology BlockchainDigital Assets like bitcoin possible but really the easiest way to think of them is as a digital medium for value a way for individuals and businesses to move value, to transact and to automate complex business processes instantly without the need for middlemen like banks. The second Big Technology is i call series. Thats no surprise in french i think you might have to double check that a guy is technology that has taken the world by storm in the last year and i think has us to really confront our humanness or at least to allow us to reimagine what we thought. Computers could do and what people could do when empowered with these tools. The Third Technology is extended reality xdr, which is word that we use to describe both our mented reality and virtual reality. For 30 years, weve had a two dimensional internet, an internet we access on computers or phones and. What extended reality promises is to the internet and turn it into a spatial web, an internet that is integrated into our natural world. And the Fourth Technology is iot, the internet of things. Now, not just talking about, you know, glucose or smart thermostats. Im talking about connected devices that can do transactions, are Economic Agents and that think, thanks to a. I. , im here to tell you today that these technologies are not separate. They are related in the same way that the term internet went from describing really narrow set of sort of networking technologies to describing a range technologies, but also new business, new social behaviors, new cultural phenomena. So too is the term web three coming to describe in this next era, with these technologies converging together, i get asked a lot, wheres all this to happen . Wheres the next silicon going to get built . Countries like canada as pointed out in his introduction, have lead in certain technologies but have never been able to capture the same kind of Critical Mass and value that Silicon Valley had in thearly days of. The web. Silicon valley was once called a tech galapagos because of the very unique blenof charactestics capital, universities, government r d, workforce and so for. That led to the unique species of company that could survive. There nowhere else. And those Companies Went on to dominate the next era of the web. So the question is, where is that going to get built . I think theres a really interesting for cities like detroit, for places like and others to a claim on the webs next economic and cultural frontier. And i actually think that the technologies just described can help to make that happen so start. There. Yeah so lets start a core concept here. For 30 years weve had an internet of information, right . So you use the web today to send and move and share information. Youre not really sending an original unique youre sending a version or a copy. So if you send an email to someone, you can send the exact same email to someone else. And if you, you know, attach a document to it, you can send copies of that document to everyone. If you a web site, anybody can see the content if you write something on twitter or an entry into wikipedia, you upload a photograph on instagram. Its available for all to see. So the internet is kind like a Printing Press for information, right . A digital Printing Press. And just like the first era of the Printing Press, it is transforming and democratizing access to information. And overall, its had a positive impact on the world, except when it comes to things that have value, things like money or other assets, stocks and bonds titles or deeds being to create copies of those things is actually not such a great idea. So instead of sending an email, lets say im sending elizabeth 20. Its very import that when she receives that 20 that she knows i dont still have a copy and. I can send the exact same 20 to someone else because if i can copy money and asset, its the way that we can copy information those assets become worthless right and this is actually a very specific Computer Science problem that people have been trying to figure out for a long time. Its called the double spend problem. How do you ensure that when you move of value online that you can prove that the person still doesnt have a copy, that there isnt still a trail of digital breadcrumbs behind . And this is a problem. You know, a lot of very smart people as said, have been trying to figure out marc andreessen, inventor of the web browser, was tried originally to put money as widget into the browser. Elon musk, the original predecessor to paypal, was originally as a digital money project. But none of these very smart people could figure out this problem. And because of that, even though the web has transformed our world in profound and important ways, we still rely basically on middlemen for all sorts of transactions both offline and online. Now, these middlemen are familiar to us, of course theres banks and brokerages and other Financial Services companies, but increasingly big Tech Companies, what we call digital conglomerates, are acting as the economic of commerce online. And overall, these middlemen perform some important roles right . They establish the identity of people in transactions who the buyer, whos the seller, whos the sender whos the receiver . They do all the business logic clearing and settling, Record Keeping and so forth, and they establish trust between parties and for doing so. They get compensated, i would argue quite handsomely as a now over all these middlemen, they do a decent job, but have some very specific limitations. Theyre centralized, which makes them vulnerable to hacking or to attack. They add costs and slow things down. They exclude big parts of the population who cant participate fully the benefits of our global economy. And they capture all this data about us, which is problematic for a couple of reasons. One, we dont own it so we can monetize it. And two, it might end up in wrong hands. So what if the internet was entering a new era from an internet of information to internet of value . Well, in 2008, an anonymous person, persons named satoshi nakamoto, developed this thing called bitcoin who sort of bitcoin . Just kidding. Youve all heard of bitcoin. Bitcoin, all the hoopla and theres a lot of hoopla was designed to solve a simple problem. It was designed to be cash for the internet, a way for one person to move value over the internet to another person without the need for a middleman, just email allowed us to move information from one person to another without having to go through the postal service. Right. Thats all it was trying to do and what was remarkable about it was that it worked. Unlike those other things that came before this one actually worked in solving the double spend problem. And it off this spark that has caught on like wildfire and captured the imagination of people in Many Industries with far reaching not just for finance, but for every single industry in the economy. So the internet is entering a new era, and with it the web is entering a new era. Now, i know that like the same thing. Im just going to clarify it. The internet was invented in the 1960s as a project of the Us Government to build a Communication Network that stay up and running in the event of a nuclear attack. But it wasnt until the 1980s and nineties that the internet became commercialized thanks to the invention of this called the world wide web. So the first era of the web, i the web that anybody over 35 probly remembers, we call it the dot com era, the dot com era, because we used to use computers to type in urls and to upload information. And basically that was web one, a medium for presentation of pretty static information on websites and it was primitive by todays standards, but it nevertheless did something profound, which that it democratized access to information for anyone who had an internet connection. So if you were a student in east lansing or in wayne state or in dubai or toronto or wherever you type the same url, you could get, the same information, Something Like that wasnt before the second era of the web brought about the era of user generated. So no longer was the web, just a place to go to consume content. It was a collaborative medium. It was a way for people to upload their own, to find their own community, to share and to connect to online. And what the second era of the web allowed was. The democratization of publishing. Of a sudden anyone could share photos of their grandkids and share their thoughts on the world and, you know, be a astronomer, so on and so forth and that collaborative medium created this new asset class of data, User Generated Content and data. Its a cliche, but its true that data is the new oil. It is the most important asset class of the digital age. Just like oil and industrial plant and equipment was the most important asset of the industrial age. The only problem with web two is that we all created this data. We didnt own it. It was owned by the platforms, the Big Companies that we interacted. And what ended up happening in web was that the big killer Business Model just basically became advertising. And so platform worked really hard to keep people hooked with recommendation engines to gather more data so they could sell more ads. And that was problematic for a lot of reasons. But one that i think the big one is that we, as Internet Users didnt really get to participate in any of that value creation. So the web and with it, the internet are entering a new era. Enter web three or the ownership the read write own web. So now not only is the web a way to access content or to share your own content and ideas and so forth, but it is a new platform that allows us to own and manage our identities and our own data to, control our own assets, and to be able to own and monetize our own digital creation as it is a new operating system for the web that in my view promises to put more power in the hands of individuals at the expense of platforms. Walk you through six transform nations, starting with what i think is the most elemental and going and sort of bigger and bigger concentric circles if youd like to understand more, encourage you to read the book because we get into that in detail. So at the very core of this are assets. Now i hear a lot from a lot of people this question about cryptocurrency seems right. I dont really understand why we have so many currencies. What are all these currencies for or why or why do we have all these Virtual Assets or Virtual Currencies . And i think that in the words that we use are, just incorrect most of these Digital Assets are not currencies. Currencies, very particular thing. The us is a currency. The canadian is a currency. Bitcoin is trying to be a currency. A currency needs to be a store of value. Bitcoin is volatile, but its proven to be a decent store of value. It needs to be a medium of exchange. Yeah, we use that. It needs to be a unit of account. What was the last time you went to the local car dealership and bought a car priced in bitcoin . Ill take the Toyota Tundra thatll one and a half bitcoins. So not yet a currency in that respect, but vast majority of these other assets arent trying be money the best way. Think ouDigital Assets tokens is as containers for value. So in the same way that a shipping container can contain furniture, clothing, canned goods, computer, you name it, right . Its an open vessel. You can fill it with whatever you want. A token can be programed to contain anything of value money, Financial Assets like stocks and bonds or other financial goods, commodities and other natural assets titles and deeds even votes in an election. The vote is kind of like a transaction if you vote, its important that when you vote that its cast and counted, that its counted only once that everyone can prove that its counted one spend that you can also verify it right kind of like sending money to someone so a token is a blank canvas that allows us to program anything of value digitally. And whats really remarkable, exceedingly remarkable about tokens is that theyre also software, so they can be programed. So you can include all sorts of complexity into these assets, money that only works in certain conditions, right . So securities that have embedded in them all. The contract logic to pay out dividends, all of this stuff is just ones and zeros that can be into the contract. So ive been working on this tokenization taxonomy for some years and i keep adding more widgets to the taxonomy right now . There are about 11 and im not going to go through each of these, but important to note is that currencies just one of 11 different types of these tokens. You know, there are tokens here that have got nothing to do with money. Nft is nonfungible tokens. Those are unique Digital Goods can be used to represent art collectibles contracts. Every contract is slightly from the next one, so we can use nft for that. Cbdcs well, those are digital money issued by governments thats got nothing to do with cryptocurrencies. As you can see, theres various different categories now a taxonomy like this is right now because were early and so its good to know kind of whats out there. But i think pretty soon a taxonomy of Digital Assets seem kind of silly. It would be sort of like having a taxonomy of websites. You know what, are the things that we can do with a website. People were asking themselves this in the nineties maybe we can put sports scores or classifieds oh, we can get the weather and encyclopedia. Yeah, thats a good idea. And so we had this sort of thing like here are the ten things we can do with a website. Of course today we know that websites are like containers kind of infinitely programable right . You can have a website be anything infinite of different store fronts or websites and landing