Nik Kalyani

I'm an entrepreneur from Mountain View, California, otherwise known as Silicon Valley. I was an early adopter who mined Bitcoin, bought CryptoKitties and NBA Topshot when they were first available among other things, so I've been in NFT and crypto space for a while. In fact, when Ethereum came out and I started learning Solidity, I would talk about it and teach about it at conferences, and Udacity asked me to author their blockchain nanodegree so developers can learn from it. So I've been in the space for a while. When trying to explain blockchain I usually start with pointing to services like Amazon and how they store your information in a database. That database is in the control of Amazon. It's a centralized database. A blockchain is a decentralized database in that instead of one entity like Amazon owning your data, it's spread out among lots of computers, and each of them has a copy of that same information, so it cannot be tampered with, and it's also designed so that once you put information in, you can never edit it. So that's your basic blockchain. Technology moves in cycles. The last big cycle was when we had Web 2.0 with e-commerce, social media, and things like that. When they were near infancy, people were like, “I'm never gonna do that.” But now we are in a new sort of technology cycle, and we’re calling it Web3. It's the ownership economy. It's where people have more control over their data and more control over their work. And, you know, that's what is exciting to me about Web3 and NFTs. They are the advent of a whole new suite of technologies that make it possible for us to operate in a world where we are not beholden to centralized, large companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, et cetera. We are now in control of our own data and our own destiny. I think the number one thing that needs to improve to achieve mass adoption is user experience. Right now, the crypto space lacking in good user experience. Once we solve that problem, and we make it so that your average end user can effortlessly use these tools without needing a lot of advanced knowledge, we'll be over the hump. But yeah, user experience problem is an unsolved one right now in crypto. Last thing I’d like to say is that people don't talk enough about failing, which I think more people should. Normalizing failing is important because that’s how you succeed. Failure is just a step on the way to success. And the, when you take away the fear of failure you open yourself up to more innovation and more possibilities for the future. A lot of people are too afraid to do things because they're afraid to fail. So, I think we should talk more about failure. twitter: @techbubble