Anas Bhurtun

So, my story… I used to practice law. I’m still a lawyer and hold my degree and certificates and all but I practiced more in London before I moved to Dubai. It was lot of corporate stuff at the time, and I was all about it. I come from a Mauritian family where becoming a lawyer was something they really appreciated, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do. I've always had a very strong creative part to me, I grew up playing guitar in a band and used to skateboard and graffiti as a kid. My dad hated it. I did photography as well while studying law. I really wanted to ensure that I found myself in something that was creative in its scope. And that's what eventually led to the building of Arts DAO. Danosch and I started a podcast called Crypto Sheikhs as a way for us to explore the Web3 space by interviewing folks. It was a creative outlet for me while still working as a lawyer. I was an in-house council at checkout.com which was doing some big-ticket kind of crypto stuff as well. I had developed a lot of crypto experience there because I was working with Binance other exchanges worldwide that were coming into the space. It came to a point where it wasn't enough for me just to do it from a legal perspective. I wanted to figure out a way to build something that nobody else had really done. Something innovative, something creative. Crypto Sheikhs podcast allowed us to meet, interview and connect with a group of people that never would've met in the ordinary course of business, starting with the likes of Kristel Bechara and then Vesa and the traders in the Space. We grew that podcast into a community with our first few meetups at Kristel’s studio, which eventually then led to the Arts DAO. The journey has been one of the most incredible things I've ever seen in my life. I quit my job as a lawyer. I remember the day I did it because my dad was like, “are you sure you wanna do this?” You know, he told me that I would be bankrupt, so I wanted to prove him wrong. I'm going to leave my job. I'm going to build something myself, and you're going to respect me for doing this one day, which is what has happened later on. We went from the smaller events that we've thrown to building the NFT collection “Ethernal Gates”, launching it, raising almost $1.5 million, and finally to deploying that money into a collection of NFTs. We were doing other things as well, like having 400 people turn up at our anniversary event, and recently, the collaboration with Ledger. It's just been an unbelievable journey I think Web3 is meant to represent a new way of collecting assets in this world. We've got the traditional asset space, we've got money, real estate, gold, silver, and we’ve also got art. And on top of that, we also have cultural assets, right? Like some people consider brands as cultural assets. Like sneakers, for example. All these assets right now live in that “real world” environment. But what Web3 is beginning to do is channel them into a digital world where a lot of us are currently living. Our lives are the way we make and spend money, like our banking transactions, they all happen through digital products. The Web3 space is ahead of its time. So maybe there's a lot of folks who don't understand how it would makes sense right now but one day all these assets in their current physical form may be held digitally as well. They might just be held in one physical place with people owning and trading them digitally without the need for those assets to physically move. It goes beyond just the assets. It's also about the contracts. The blockchain represents a new legal system for the internet. Contracts on paper are not programmable, they’re just static. What's interesting about this space is that the contractual mechanism around blockchain is interacting with real world assets, potentially in digital assets and allowing money assets and various other things that are important to our lives to become programmable, movable through code capable of being traded without really us being involved in them. And that, I think, is a real revolution. Adoption is going to happen when people use these assets and not know that they're using blockchain. So, I like to always compare it to the kitchen. You turn on the tap and the water comes through but you don't know where that water came from. You don't really care. The water system and the piping are all in the background and you're just consuming it happily, right? You don't need to think about where this came from, how it's developed, why does it work this way? What is the plumbing? Except if you have a small problem, then you call a plumber, and he comes in and fixes it. Crypto needs to become a plumbing system for this world. And that's a big part of what I want to build with Arts DAO. I believe in the future, and I believe assets are all going to be plumbed by Web3. You will buy real estate and not know that it's tokenized by a blockchain. It might not be Ethereum, but it might be a different kind of blockchain because it's more efficient than the current contractual system that we use right now. That's where I think we'll see real full-scale adoption.