Why many Fortune 500 companies are embracing Web3

CEO and Founder of Decasonic Paul Hsu joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss how Web3 is being integrated into games and businesses.

Video Transcript

- Hancock, you sign first.

- No king? Gentlemen, have you take a leave of your senses?

- The people shall have the rights to vote.

- Even the stupid ones?

- Yes.

- Stupid people vote?

- Yes.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE HYMAN: That was the ad for one of the crypto trading platforms that had advertisements during the Super Bowl last night. That one, of course, starring Larry David, and he's skeptical of crypto as well. So the implication being, well, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Paul Hsu is joining us now.

He's CEO and founder of Decasonic, which is a crypto venture capital fund. And I do want to talk about what you guys are getting into, talk about Web3 and the metaverse, but first, I do want to talk about the Super Bowl, and that's because there were so many crypto ads, Paul. If 2022 is analogous to 2000, what's the pets.com from the ads that we saw last night?

PAUL HSU: A lot of memorable ads last night. It was quite enjoyable. All these ads give me a lot of optimism for crypto adoption. It makes me bullish for a lot of the builders they're building in blockchain. With Coinbase, Meta, FTX ads, this year's game was the crypto bowl.

Many of you will remember the QR codes and Larry David. Yeah, I have my QR code up there today too. By comparison, the Super Bowl in 2000 was called the dotcom Bowl, when internet companies took up 1-5 Super Bowl ads. We all remember that pets.com sock puppet and the E-trade baby. If history rhymes again, longer term, we could see crypto as mainstream as the internet today.

JULIE HYMAN: But Paul, you're focusing just on the positive part of those parallels, if I may say. That was also the peak at that point, right? Yes, we've had another peak now, but that was then the peak, and there are a lot of players, including pets.com, that didn't survive. So where are we in terms of the parallels in that way for the crypto cycle? Are there a lot of players that are not going to make it?

PAUL HSU: We're long term investors or early stage crypto native venture fund, investing in building blockchain innovations for the mainstream. From our perspective, it might be a bear market for traders, but it's a bull market for builders. We invest in top tier founders.

We call them outlier founders. They're optimistic, they're building use cases for the blockchain. My quick background is in building these long term technologies. I've been building, scaling and investing in blockchain since 2013.

Earlier in my career, I was a Silicon Valley VC and then I became a product executive at Zynga, where we built games like Farmville for the mainstream. In 2018 I founded Decasonic. And what we're seeing is that these founders are building use cases for the blockchain to solve real pain points. They have this optimism to make the internet work better for everyone.

BRIAN SOZZI: Paul, your QR code is not bouncing around the screen. Feel free to hit that button and get it popping. You know, it's OK. We're just live and everything. But--

PAUL HSU: Hey, I'm not giving away free Bitcoin.

BRIAN SOZZI: OK, fair enough. I'll try to scan it before we say goodbye to you. Talk to us on how you view Web3. There are a lot of definitions out there for this, but how do you see it as a veteran in the space?

PAUL HSU: Web3 is the next generation internet. It upgrades the key bugs that exist in the internet that you and I use every day. A lot of people on crypto call that Web2. I believe Web3 is the biggest opportunity of our lifetime. Web3 gives us a clean slate to do things better, especially for people who are less fortunate.

A use case is around seamless banking services, especially borrowing money instead of payday loans if you're poor. Another use case is streamlined digital money transfers, especially sending money overseas, instead of Western Union, if you're an immigrant. And then lastly, another use case is freedom to build wealth, especially selling art NFTs instead of art galleries, if you're a graphic designer.

JULIE HYMAN: Paul, there is so much idealism baked into what you're saying and what a lot of people, how they view Web3, right? But in practice, I know there have been some criticisms of how Web3 has evolved. That even though in theory it's supposed to be decentralized, power is still held in a few hands and it has to go through a limited number of pipes, if you will. How do you think that, that situation is going to play out? And will we see the actual promise being fulfilled of that decentralization?

PAUL HSU: With any early technology, there are always skeptics , and a lot of those concerns are valid. We're still developing this technology as adoptions taking place. Blockchain today is the internet in 2000. We're really this early. Today, there are about 28 million crypto users in the US, about one in every 11 people.

Overall, crypto is exploding a lot faster. 300 million crypto users across the world, in Africa, in Southeast Asia. These are the use cases are growing faster. This is very similar to internet adoption in 2000. But what we're seeing today is blockchain adoption is growing faster.

BRIAN SOZZI: Paul, is the metaverse over-hyped?

PAUL HSU: I love the metaverse. There is a lot of hype around it. For builders like us, we think of Web3 as the bridge between blockchain and the metaverse. That the promise of the metaverse, as an immersive internet experience that blends the online with offline with meaningful connections, is something that gets a lot of us technologists excited. A lot of young kids already experience the metaverse today, Minecraft, Snapchat, and Roblox.

In the business world, you might have experienced it as well. You might have attended a virtual conference that allowed you to create avatars of yourself, join immersive breakout rooms and engage with sponsors with virtual swag. By 2026, Gartner forecasts that 1 in 4 people will spend at least an hour a day in the metaverse for work and play. So we're still very early with the metaverse.

JULIE HYMAN: As I was just saying to the team, my kids already spend an hour a day in the metaverse, so I can easily see that future. Paul Hsu, thank you so much for being here. CEO and founder of Decasonic, giving us some perspective on these big Web3, metaverse ideas.