The Everything Marketplace

If Amazon is the “everything marketplace” for physical items… who will be the everything marketplace for digital items?

The trick being pulled by crypto assets, the rabbit from the hat, which is generating so much in value… is we are generating new products that are legible in a digital context.

You could think of Bitcoin as being a mirror-world, digital version of gold that is now openly legible in the global marketplace.

Digitization of value has obvious benefits: most notably portability and speed of transfer.

With Blockchains, you get finality of settlement and ownership provenance.

They are the rails that make the global marketplace possible.

This means that every future asset, whether natively digital or becoming digitized (Think deeds, stock certificates, homes, etc.) will be brought into the global market consciousness.

Liquidity is a product, and exchanges and LPs will supply it for you.

In this world, individuals trade and mitigate risks by hedging their exposures through an ever-growing list of assets.

Optionality abounds.

You hedge through fractionalization. You can re-sell or rent.

You can instantly get insurance, credit, or loans.

The volume of this marketplace will be massive. Whether it accrues to one exchange is unlikely, however, the amalgamation of exchanges will likely make this possible.

Could the everything marketplace be Opensea? Which does Billions of volume in NFT’s. Are NFT’s the “books” and the wedge into the market?

Could the everything marketplace be FTX? Binance?

Or maybe more like Uniswap? Or all of them combined?

One thing you could look for is that generational founder. I would see that in Sam from FTX or CZ from Binance. Both are probably some of the top entrepreneurs of our decade. With Sam being roughly 30 years old.

And what would be the moat of an everything digital exchange? Maybe lock-in via tokens that provide access and discount? The value accrual is in the native token?

My guess is we will first start by seeing Crypto exchanges move into Stocks, the same way Robinhood is moving into Crypto.

From there, it’s just another column, another asset type; for example Coinbase moving into NFT’s.

Maybe history will repeat, maybe it will Rhyme. But I think this is happening faster than we think.

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XX I’m David Sherry, I coach early-stage founders, invest in crypto, and write on the overlap of investing, crypto, and the creator economy.

You can join my Telegram chat for more real-time notes on what I’m thinking.