BCCN3 attended this year’s Dcentral Miami in Miami, Florida, to cover the latest in the web3 community. Web3 founders and influencers spoke about everything from the death of GameFi to exotic cars as NFTs to memecoins becoming a mainstay. We attended many of the keynotes and interviewed several speakers and founders. Here are three takeaways from Dcentral Miami. 

Owning your own assets

One broad theme at the conference was emphasizing the importance of true ownership of digital assets. Speakers such as Sandy Carter, SVP at Unstoppable, Crypto Blood, a long time quant trader, and Charles Anderson, founder and CEO of NEST, spoke about real world ownership versus institutional custody.

Mr. Anderson highlighted the idea that digital assets do not truly belong to an owner until those assets have been encrypted. His company, NEST, offers real world custody and provenance solutions to customers. 

The founder went on to say that by its very nature control of assets cannot be partial to one network. “You cannot own an asset like tickets or contracts…until they are encrypted and belong to you. You cannot own an asset until you have control of it…that control must be network-agnostic,” he said. (‘Network agnostic’ means a project’s team is not partial to one particular blockchain.)

Memecoins are here to stay

In a panel discussion on the topic of memecoins and community coins, speakers shared their views on various altcoins and why they believe these assets are strong. The panelists included crypto YouTuber; founder of Proof Of Memes, Roger Malcolm III; successful memecoin investor, B-Roots; and UFC fighter Ian Heinisch.

The panelists spoke about memecoins such as DOGE and SHIB and how the number of wallets has increased tremendously. B-Roots stated that wallets holding SHIB have increased from a couple of hundred to tens of thousands in the last two years. 

Mr. Malcolm talked about how his company, Proof Of Memes, works to quantify value in memecoins. All of the panelists spoke about how memecoins in particular have much more enthusiasm than some of the larger altcoins, or even bitcoin. For example, Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for Dogecoin has made the price of $DOGE pop just by his mention of the coin.

This enthusiasm can be used for more than just personal wealth transformation. As Mr. Heinisch described it, “We want to use crypto for more than just making money. We want to use that for a good cause. We want to give back.” 

GameFi in its current form is dead

A GameFi panel, titled “GameFi, Play2Earn and What’s Next?”,  had COO of MarketAcross, Itai Elizur; Com2u USA Business Development Manager, Brian Choi; Lootbolt President, Brycent GG; and MegaFans CEO, Jeffrey Donnelly. These panelists spoke very openly and critically about the current state of GameFi. 

In sum, the discussion surrounded what is flawed in the GameFi ecosystem, how it can be repaired and how this particularly difficult chapter in the history of GameFi is just part of the natural evolution. 

Much of the problem is that even with the rise of Play2Earn (P2E) which, despite its improvement over Pay2Play (P2P), still involved Ponzi economics. 

As Brycent GG explained it, “GameFi is dead…because you're taking finance and putting it at the forefront of gaming. You’re deceiving people into believing that putting a financial mechanism with a gaming UI [user interface] is going to be the end-all-be-all.” This financial incentive makes gamers believe that web3 games are more about money than they are for the gaming experience. 

Mr. Donnelly, the most seasoned and experienced of the speakers, said that the way GameFi can rebuild its broadly marred reputation is to “build better games [and] make it seamless.”  This has to be required of game developers and eSports developers in order to build interest and value in the eyes of the general market.

Dcentral Miami overall

The main takeaway from this year’s Dcentral Miami was that 2022 has to be written off as a bad year for web3. 2022 has been tarnished by the crypto bear market, a deluge of degen art in NFTs, the failure of P2E games, collapsed coins and exchanges, and a lack of privacy and ownership. 

Yet, despite the sore spots and downtrends, web3 is in a good position to rebound. Many of the speakers, including YouTuber Wendy O, spoke about how the world is still on the cusp of a blockchain revolution. Moreover, the fall of FTX, while very painful for investors in the short term, is good in the long term because bad actors are being shaken out. 

Blockchain companies are still developing and the market is examining what they are offering. Some of it is good and has major potential while others are simply not meeting market demand or are outright scams. Either way, web3 is here to stay and has a bright future ahead as a natural evolution in the current Digital Age.