| Good morning, Marketer, are you blockchain-literate? “My mind had been marinating overnight — and for more than a year, really — in the abstrusities of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology on which they are built… Some of this stuff I understood; much of it I still did not.” Nick Paumgarten writing in The New Yorker in 2018. I think a lot of us know how he feels. But blockchain and cryptocurrency aren’t new any more. They emerged together in 2008. Non-fungible tokens are a more recent development, as is Web3, the concept of a blockchain-based decentralized internet (which may or may not be linked to the metaverse). So it’s incumbent on us, I think, to understand these ideas as well as we can, if not at the level of the math and coding. Even the U.S. government is now trying to understand cryptocurrency — ambitious, perhaps, when politicians so frequently demonstrate a feeble grasp of data privacy and the workings of social media. I guess blockchain and crypto are finally mainstream enough to be regulated. Kim Davis
Editorial Director | 