Internet ² | Andy Tang

I just want to cover 2 things today. What happened in 2017 and what I think will happen in 2018 or beyond. Sounds like a fair first talk for a conference. All right. I'm going to quickly move through this. The title of the talk is Internet Square. In other words, I think this thing is big. I think it's transformative. It's not Internet 2.0, 3.0. Basically, it's orthogonal. It takes internet, it's a basic fundamental block where the technology enabled many businesses, it kind of changes it on it. It decentralizes it and it made it more independent. So, 2017, you have all these consortiums. These are not internet, these are not blockchain companies, but these are industry consortiums looking into blockchain. And just to give you a sense of scale, yes, it's true, we finance people are kind of geeking out over here and say, hey, blockchain's awesome, let's get rid of payment, let's, you know, decentralize the banks. But I think we're kind of missing the forest for the trees. The real technology here, blockchain, not cryptocurrency, but blockchain, it actually touches upon many different industries. Financial services, yes, you know, overwhelmingly the dominant. But if you look at other things like energy, healthcare, you look at even food, even public sector, it's everything. I just discovered there was actually a panel here. So you actually have big companies jumping in on the blockchain, trying to deploy this technology. I'll just give you one example. Most people don't think of food as sort of a blockchain. I mean, unless you're really in the core of a blockchain. When you think about, when you talk to general public, they think about blockchain, Bitcoin. That's just scratching the surface. People are tracking food using blockchain. Okay. What else happened in 2017? I mean, this is probably what everyone talks about, the big ICOs. You have, you know, a new chain called Ethereum. Or somewhat new to the public. They figure out KiloApp, and that is to allow these projects to raise money. Very small application in my mind. It's raising money. But guess what? It turned my world upside down. The blue lines of bars are the equity. The orange lines are the crypto coins being raised. That's my profession. I'm getting disrupted. So, I decided, you know, I'm gonna go with the wave. So, we had 2 crypto hedge funds dedicated to ICOs, in addition to our fiat, you know, equity fund. Right, I don't need to tell you this, you, or some of you are crypto people, if you even just read any news. You think Bitcoin has risen a lot, but look at the entire crypto market cap. This is really where the story is. So up to $600 billion for the entire market cap.