Good morning: Blockchain is going mainstream

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Good morning, Marketers, 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

Shorts

The outer limits. Slim Jim, the snack brand, is apparently creating “a meataverse,” a virtual market that will offer virtual foods, presumably to satisfy virtual appetites. Commented musician Loz Kaye, “Surely a PETAverse will follow.”

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.