Welcome to Forkast Forecasts 2023. In this series, leaders, innovators and visionaries in blockchain share their industry predictions for the year ahead.
Gary Liu
Gary Liu is the founder and chief executive of Artifact Labs, a company leading the development of historical non-fungible tokens (NFT) to preserve on the blockchain. In his previous role as CEO of the South China Morning Post (SCMP), Liu oversaw an extensive digital transformation of the Hong Kong-based publishing group.
In his previous role as the CEO of news aggregator Digg, Gary spearheaded the New York startup’s reinvention as a data-powered media platform. Liu has also worked at AOL, Google and Spotify.
Predictions for 2023
NFTs become the building blocks of Web 3.0
“The most exciting thing about 2023 will be the invention of new applications for blockchain technologies, including NFTs.”
“There is going to be a lot of innovation. What we have to realize is that NFTs are not just a new category of digital assets. They are, frankly, the building blocks for Web3. So during this period of time, you will see builders, entrepreneurs and investors putting money and putting effort into the pipes, into the infrastructure that is going to make Web3 scale in the future.”
“Different kinds of applications are going to be invented for NFTs. They’re not just pictures that you put money into and hope that it grows in value over time. It’s not going to be just a speculative asset, but rather, it is actually going to become the Lego blocks that eventually assembled will become the next version of the decentralized Internet.”
Institutions will protect their intellectual property through NFTs
“NFTs fundamentally are ways to create and then protect IP in the digital world, and that’s what their fundamental innovation really is. When we look at history, we realize that there is so much IP that should be protected in this way and that can be of utility in Web3. I expect that over the course of the next several years, more and more historical organizations, cultural institutions as well as brands are going to realize protecting IP in the real world. Of course, everyone does this, and now we need to protect our IP in the digital world. There really was no good way of doing that prior to blockchain technology and to NFTs. And so I do expect that more and more of this historical IP is going to be moved into the Web3 world and NFTs.”
New NFT collections will need more intrinsic value to survive
“The market is saturated right now. We have our blue chips, and then we have all the rest. And especially in a down market, it’s been proven that all the rest can’t really hold value… So I think that we are going to evolve into a world where NFTs really must have true utility. They must have value more so than just a group of people saying it has value. There has to be intrinsic value in the asset itself or the underlying asset that it represents. That’s what is going to drive NFT innovation.”