In Focus: Megatrends  

'Everyone needs to own crypto'

Yukso said: "Crypto [is] going to become the evolution of centralised technology, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc in a decentralised world."

It would feed from an increasingly ownership-oriented mentality, whereby ownership and value stays with the creator of content and does not benefit the platform which hosts it instead.

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"We will shift from being a community to being an economy. Whereas today we rent from the big platforms we will own the platforms."

He said the vast majority of niche crypto products were not worth considering but investors should hold the core protocols will be "super important as this internet of value takes off".

The internet has five protocols, which support its various functions from browsing the web to having a video call but have no value attached to them.

Crypto has similar protocols but they themselves have value, he said. "Bitcoin is like TCPIP, it's the base layer protocol that all value can be exchanged over, like www. Etherium is this toolkit that allows this massive world to be cobbled together and you can build applications on top of it, like decentralised finance, then you've got Filecoin which basically replaces FTP to allow us to transfer files in a decentralised fashion...

"Blockchain technology allows value to be bi-directional. In the old days value had to be physically handed to one another or electronically transferred using a trusted third party. 

"Now I can take anything of value, put it on to chain, create a token, an entry on a ledger...so all value will migrate into a digital form and we will live in a digital world, which is why Bitcoin has value."

Yukso does believe Bitcoin will become regulated, however.

"The banks will fight over the next five years and they'll try to pass regulation to slow down the adoption," he said.

carmen.reichman@ft.com