How the metaverse will reorganize humanity into global tribes | Interview with Yoni Assia

Foreign. What's up, everyone? I'm Giovanni from Web Summit 2021. I have the pleasure to be joined by Yoni Asia, CEO at eToro. How are you doing?

Very good, very good. Enjoying the crypto rally and craze here at the web Summit.

Yeah, and actually I wanted to talk with you about the markets. So the current situation in the bitcoin market, how do you evaluate it? Do we have still some steam in this bull run? Are we going to see even higher highs in 2021? What do you think?

The market obviously is very bullish right now across the board. A lot of the crypto community are expecting this to continue. So in a lot of sort of closed room, open rooms, I hear people talking about Bitcoin at 80, 90, 100,000 by the end of the year. But you never know, you never know what's on, going, going on in the markets. So it's hard to predict. But long term, I think what we're seeing is mass market adoption. So the amount of interest in crypto, the amount of people in a place like the web summit who know what crypto is, who tried crypto, who are talking about defi, who are talking about meme coins, is I'm, you know, like I would say 100 times bigger than it was the last Web Summit two years ago.

So we can expect probably an exponential increase by the time we're going to have the next web summit. Probably there are going to be even more people involved in crypto. I guess.

I think the first web summit I was here, I don't remember whether it's 2014 or 15. I talked about bitcoin and I had a slide. So saying, here's something you should look at. I think bitcoin was at less than $1,000 and I said, what will reach 5,000 first, Bitcoin or Nasdaq? Since the Nasdaq is now at 15,000 and Bitcoin obviously is at 62,000. So, you know, I'm a very big believer in the value of bitcoin. Long term we might have some time a correction, but long term, I'll be surprised if four years from now we won't see bitcoin at much higher prices.

And talking about this year, you mentioned meme coins. So this year we saw a number of meme coins rising up like we saw dogecoin. Now we are seeing Shiba Inu and so on. Do you see this meme coin trend as a positive phenomenon or you see it as a detrimental for the industry?

I don't, I Definitely don't think it's detrimental. I think it's interesting that people realize the power of the community. Right. So, so what it is, it's really people saying, hey, you know, disregard fundamentals. If Bitcoin was a bridge for a lot of people who think finance and they said like, wait, it's not a company worse than intrinsic value, but you have scarcity, etc. Then when you look at these coins, it's really just the power of the community. Right. It's like a group of people together that are raising the value of their own bags. And that trend is really, you know, what we started in Toro a long time ago around social trading. It's people realizing how they impact the market. So the trend as a trend is interesting. I know some bitcoin Maxis, I don't like things like Doge or Shiba, but I think if it brings people into the markets eventually, I think it's a good thing. Obviously there's very high risk, but that's true for anything that goes up 1000% has a very high risk because you can always see reversal. Right. So this doesn't mean that I'm saying I don't believe in this coin or that coin, but if you're investing in something that rose 10x, then you should consider the risk. It could go back in time.

Yeah. I was more thinking about the potential negative impact that those kind of speculative, purely speculative coins can have on potential new players coming into the market. Like feeling a little bit like off put from this kind of phenomena. But maybe you don't agree.

I think again, I think every person should calculate their own risk and make their own investment in trading decisions. I've seen a lot of people getting into the market now because of Shiba and Doge. So if people are coming to the market because of Shiba and Doge, they'll eventually buy Bitcoin as well. That's my view. And the same is true to NFTs. You know, do I think every NFT is worth its value? I don't know. So I can decide whether to buy it or not to buy it. If I don't buy it, that means I don't necessarily agree with the value. But if people agree between themselves that, you know, a specific NFT is worth $50,000, that's what it is worth for them. And it's good because it's bringing more people eventually to crypto and to blockchain. So all of the, all of the, anything that eventually brings that innovation to higher adoption in my View is generally good. Again, I'll put a caveat and say obviously, you know, there are things that are problematic. You know, there are frauds, there are blah, blah, blah. So but I'm talking about, like, if it's real and the community is real, then I think it's good.

Yeah. I wanted to also touch upon another trend which we are seeing right now, which is the metaverse. So for now, it's a buzzword. It's like an ideal, a projection of a possible future that can be built using blockchain technology, using NFTs. But we are also seeing that Facebook is entering this, is also adopting this concept because it rebranded not long ago into meta. And so here I see two trends. We are seeing the attempts of the crypto community to decentralize, to create a metaverse that is decentralized, where people own their own own their own identity. And on the other hand, we have like a big corporation like Facebook which is creating its own metaverse, where probably things are not going to be so decentralized, but there is a high risk of potential manipulation looking at the past behavior of Facebook. So how does this kind of fight for the metaverse playing out? Who is going to win? Is it going to be the big tech, the big corp to win, or it's going to be the decentralized community of crypto to eventually take the upper end?

So first of all, I'd say, and you can look at my public portfolio, I'm investing in Facebook. I'm less critical of Facebook. Like others, I think I'm using their products. I'm using Facebook, I'm using WhatsApp, I'm using Instagram. I like to invest in companies that I use their products. If I use their products, I think they're good companies generally. So I'm less of a critic against Facebook in general. I think most chances are Mark is going to do the dive into decentralized. I think I'll be very surprised if eventually Facebook's meta isn't going to be an interface into a decentralized metaverse. I don't think they're going to try and centralize it because it doesn't make sense. What is the metaverse? The metaverse is again, it's communities of people that are creating their own small universe. Right. So in our universe, you have countries, and those countries consolidated around currencies, right around the language, around their shared utilities. And suddenly now we're on the Internet and we're building these small countries. Right. The community of Bitcoin is sort of you know, within it. Although bitcoin is very diverse, there are a lot of people, right, in bitcoin. It's like very large ecosystem. But now some of these countries suddenly have their flags, right? They have their flags in NFTs. Whether it's, you know, desperate ape wives or whether it's a crypto ape, you know, they have a flag. It's like, it reminds me, reminding me of when you think like 500 years ago, you had these tribes going with the flags and the flag had a picture. It's that, right? People are tribing around, communities are tribing around and are showing the value of that tribe. But that value of the tribe is not like it used to be 400, 500 years ago where they went on horses and killed people. It's something that you see on the Internet. It's, what is the value of that nft? What is the value of Sheba? And what do all of these guys want? It's not necessarily only about the money. It's about being a part of that community, being a part of that club. So I think that metaverse is to some extent, and again, this is a big, A big thing, right? It's our universe, right? It's humanity reorganizing itself from countries to global tribes. And those global tribes each have a currency and a flag, and they're going to have probably some virtual land and gatherings, etc. So it's super interesting to see it because eventually I'm from Israel, you're from Italy, we have people here from probably 100 different countries. But suddenly our generation shares. There's more shared things between the people here at the web summit than most people when they come back to their countries with generally just the general population, right?

Yeah. So basically you are imagining this virtual world where there will be the tribe of Facebook, but then there will be the tribe of Bitcoin. And all these tribes are going to be some sort of connected in, within the same metaverse. So you don't see like a monopolization of the metaverse from a centralized entity like Facebook.

Again, I don't think. I think Facebook will create a platform, a user interface for people to explore the various metaverses, to walk around them, to choose them. What we're seeing now in crypto is a very abstract model of it, right? It's a very abstract model. If you ask somebody that's very passionate about crypto specific currency or an nft, they're going to explain to you why that is. But it doesn't have a user interface. Yet, but it's all in people's minds. It's all like it's completely imagined, it's almost completely imaginary. Right. And gradually there's a question of is this going to sort of manifest into like a sleek user interface which will enable more and more people to sort of join that trend Tribe communities.

Yeah, it's interesting because at the beginning of this event we saw the whistleblower at the Facebook whistleblower that took like a very important position at the beginning of the conference. And it seemed to me that the conference itself wanted to give space to some sort of criticism towards certain behavior of Facebook. What are your thoughts about that?

Again, I'm not saying this way or another. I just, you know, I believe in the economics from the point of view. If I'm using a product of a company, that means I usually think that company is good. That's what they're doing. They're developing a product, I'm using the product. For me, it's good. Do they need to always fix things about how they run their business? I'm not sufficiently versed into the details to tell you yes, no, etc. Because I'm just looking at it from the product perspective. You know, I drink Coca Cola, I like their product. Is it good for my teeth? Probably not, but I still drink Coca Cola.

So one last question would be regarding next year. So what are the milestones that you are looking forward to see achieved in the crypto space in 2022?

I think a part of it is bringing more people again into using new types of technologies. It's still very hard. I think Web3 is still very hard for normal people. I think it's actually interesting that NFTs are bringing people sort of across the bringing a new type of audience into crypto to use crypto in a way which is very complicated, but actually bring non sophisticated people into crypto. So I think that's very interesting and we're looking into the NFT space and again we at Etoro, I believe in diversification so that people need to invest across a lot of different assets, both equities. Right. So I'm also a big believer in the stock markets. I think part of what we're going to see is more financial institutions adopting crypto one way or another. They'll always lag behind more crypto native companies. But I think we'll gradually see more banks enable their customers to invest in crypto related products.