Decentralized social media can change content ownership in 2023

Welcome to Forkast Forecasts 2023. In this series, leaders, innovators and visionaries in blockchains share their industry predictions for the year ahead.

Marieke Flament

Marieke Flament is a French-born computer engineer and the chief executive officer of NEAR Foundation, a Switzerland-based nonprofit organization that dedicated to the community and mission of the NEAR ecosystem, a layer 1 blockchain. 

Formerly the CEO of Mettle, a fintech company, Flament has also served as the chief marketing officer of Circle, the issuer of USDC stablecoin.

Predictions for 2023

Decentralized social media could change content ownership

“One of the things I’m super interested in for 2023 is the reinvention of social media and what will Web 3.0 do for that? And when you look at the current debacle we’re having with Twitter, thinking through Web3 gives real hope for changing the ownership of content and of data from that space… When we think of other innovations, definitely anything related to reinventing social media.”

DeFi innovation will create more transparency

“In terms of DeFi (decentralized finance), what will be interesting for next year is the continuous innovation we see in this space. Because we’ve seen in 2022 that what actually doesn’t work is centralized finance. The things we’ve seen are very much linked to third parties which rely on humans being in the middle. So in 2023, more transparency, more on-chain data and more innovation in DeFi are what we’re going to continuously see to enable Web3.”

Web3 will gain more real-life use cases

“In 2022 we started seeing the birth of some real-life [Web3] use cases. We will continue to see that in 2023, which is extremely important for the entire space. It is important to actually see what are the real life use cases and how Web3 can be used as an additional layer of infrastructure on the internet to enable people to actually have control of their data and of their assets.”