Real estate is about as traditional an asset as there is, but even so, it is not insulated from digital transformation. Over the last few decades, it has been common to describe internet changes as Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and now Web3. Web 1.0 was the great opening of the information superhighway where users mostly received content. Web 2.0 marked the shift to the more user-generated content that dominates today. Web3 describes a vision of the internet where people participate in governance and ownership through DAOs and “smart contracts” undergirded by blockchain technology. It is not clear where we lost the ‘.0’ this time around and these changes are still very much a work in progress.
It hasn’t helped to understand this potential transformation that much of the public perception about these shifts is caught up in the cryptocurrency roller coaster. All cryptocurrency is blockchain, but not all blockchain is cryptocurrency. A connected process is that the increasing number of internet-enabled devices creating data over the last few decades led to the rise of “big data” analytics.
