Why Web3 won't make the world more equal

Jan 25, 2022|Abdul Abdulrahim

When you have friends that work at investment funds, dinner table conversations tend to revert to financial opportunities pretty quickly—and arguably more frequently than is socially acceptable. Interest in cryptocurrencies has recently replaced some of the usual discussions around public equity opportunities in emerging markets or hidden gems in the mid-market private equity space.

At one of our dinner catch-ups, I was both shocked and amused at an investment opportunity my friends stumbled on.

Some takeaways:

By volume, Nigeria trades north of $400 million of Bitcoin each year, behind the US and Russia but African countries only hold a 0.6% share of cryptocurrency funds worldwide.
One of the few tragedies of global innovation is that the poor can remain poor. They might be better off than where they were yesterday, but relative to other winners, they are still poor.
In the long run, the true financial winners of a new internet built on Web3 will be those who are able to acquire or own key assets and infrastructure (capital)—and unfortunately, like the real world, capital isn’t evenly distributed across the world.

The short of it is that a friend was offered a hotdog stand as an asset in a Web3 game for north of $50,000.

Virtual hotdogs must cost a pretty penny.

To provide a bit more context, one of his colleagues who invests heavily in the Web3 space had bought a digital asset in a Web3 game that is yet to be released. This game will likely be similar to the Sims—a life simulation video game—that will allow players to own virtual assets that they interact with. For owning these assets, players get paid the equivalent of rent or dividends in cryptocurrencies.

This colleague currently owns a hotel in the game and has