I’m convinced everyone will own an NFT

Tell me something that’s true, that almost nobody agrees with you?

Web3 is not the evolution of the Internet but a new flavor of it. I hate the term Web3 because it creates a sense of natural evolution or strict improvement compared to Web2. I do believe that Web3 is like an alternate version of the Internet where the fundamental primitive is property, whereas the fundamental primitive of Web2 is abundance. A bit like Steampunk science-fiction, where the main source of energy isn’t oil or nuclear power, but steam, and society has structured itself around it.

That’s one of the reasons why Web2 people have such an adverse reaction to blockchain: so far, we’ve never needed it. Monuments to human ingenuity like Linux or Wikipedia were built with no token incentives, staking mechanism or even money. And then someone comes around and shouts “now we’re going to use money because it’s better.” Not everything is suddenly better with this native digital scarcity and magic Internet coins, but some things will suddenly become possible. And that’s what matters.

The burden of proof rests on blockchain-native models to prove they can build as much, or more. I’m convinced we can.

What did you want to be when you grow up?

First I wanted to be an archeologist, then a scientist but I quickly realized I don’t really have a knack for science. Then a writer, a teacher, probably a philosopher at some point, and finally landed on entrepreneur.

How did you get interested in web3 and what you are currently working on?

I learnt about blockchain around 2015, first as a political tool to escape centralized systems and manage value in a decentralized fashion. That was already pretty revolutionary. Then around 2017 I dug more and discovered you can do a lot of stuff with blockchain thanks to smart contracts. Someone advised me to look at NFTs, I wrote my master’s thesis on them and how they could recompose value chains in cultural industries. I then joined Ledger as a product manager in 2018.

I’m currently working on briq, an NFT creation and composability protocol built around fundamental building blocks. You can create NFTs out of little blocks called “briqs”, and disassemble the NFTs to get the briqs back and build something else. Think of briqs as NFT matter. If you own an NFT built with briqs, you own the NFT and the stuff it’s made out of. So you can always create something new.

What soft & hard skills have been most helpful in helping you succeed in web3?

Can’t really say I’ve quite made it in Web3, I still have a long way to go to say I’ve “succeeded in web3”!

For hard skills: a solid grasp of blockchain basics. What is a transaction? What is a private key? How does a smart contract work? It helps you understand what is and isn’t currently possible, figure out the dos and don’ts. I’ve already built products leveraging blockchain and that definitely helped me avoid common pitfalls and quickly implement best practices without reinventing the wheel every time.

For soft skills: efficient networking definitely helps knowing what’s the latest on such or such a topic. Blockchain goes so fast that it’s impossible to keep track of everything, knowing who’s the reference on a certain topic helps you speed up tremendously.

What’s the best thing about your job? The most challenging?

The best thing is to constantly learn new things and tackle problems that have never been faced before. You really feel that you’re pushing the boundaries, I really love it. You learn something new everyday building a blockchain protocol.

It’s also the most challenging thing. You always hear about “founder’s solitude”, that you have no one to talk to about your problems. To be more precise, I’d say that you have plenty of people to talk about your issues, but no one can help you. When there’s a problem, there’s only one person that can solve it; and it’s you.

It’s true for a lot of jobs, it’s especially true for founders, and even more so in an ecosystem with no blueprints like blockchain.

What’s the most important or impactful project about web3 you created? What made it so important or impactful?

So far the biggest project I’ve worked on is the Ledger Vault, Ledger’s institutional product. Think of it as a hardware wallet for banks. I can’t tell you too much but it’s a massive piece of software that is necessary for the democratization of cryptocurrencies. If my grandmother is to hold cryptocurrencies there’s little chance she will have a Metamask. Or a Ledger hardware wallet. She will want to use her bank to store it for her. This is what the Ledger Vault allows: it’s a bank vault for cryptocurrencies and digital assets at large.

Custody is such a massive issue in cryptocurrency. I believe that a good part of users will not want to hold their keys. I love that it’s an option, and I understand that “not your keys, not your bitcoin”, but if blockchain is poised to become a massive technology, this complexity will have to be abstracted away.

What are the best decisions and the worst decisions you have made in this industry?

Best decision I’ve made was joining Ledger in 2018 when the Ledger Vault team was still small and the product in development. I was there when we first launched and worked on all the features. It’s exciting to work on a new product, even more so when you’re working on something that has never been done before.

The worst decision was to write my entire Master’s thesis on NFTs in 2018, document all the big NFT projects back then, and not buy a single one.

What is your favorite web3 Project? Among the people you’ve worked/interacted with in web3, who do you admire most and why?

I really love Loot. It was a sort of “the king is naked” or “there is no spoon” moment for me. You don’t need detailed JPEGs, you don’t need complex 3D models; NFTs are nothing more than database entries and that’s already more than enough. Seeing how much was built on top of Loot, and the speed helped me realize what NFTs can actually bring about.

Among the people that I admire most are Nicolas Bacca (@btchip), Ledger’s technical co-founder who taught me a lot about blockchain and security. The whole Ledger team at large has taught me so much professionally, and I can’t thank them enough.

I’m always always impressed by what Ronan Sandford (@wighawag) is building, he’s one of the secret hidden bosses of the NFT ecosystem. Last but not least, @guiltygyoza is my benchmark for building “illegal stuff” on the blockchain, like physics simulation or 3D rendering on-chain.

Favorite web3 thinker on social media?

I started with Chris Dixon and Joel Monegro back in 2017. Now it would be @zoink, @dhof or Will Robinson.

What is your vision for your niche? What do you expect to come in the next few years? What developments in the field do you find to be the most exciting?

I don’t believe everyone on the planet will own cryptocurrencies, but I’m convinced everyone will own an NFT. The next few years will see the rise of L2-native applications allowing the massive democratization of blockchain applications, specifically NFTs.

The most exciting development in NFT in my opinion is the appearance and formal conceptualization of CC0 NFTs like Toadz, Loot and Blitmaps. These are NFTs that don’t have copyrights attached to them, they are released as “public domain” for everyone to remix and reuse. This allows everyone to build on top of them while still capturing the cultural value through the artifact of the NFT.

It’s like selling a vintage copy of Moby Dick: the text is in the public domain, but your original version signed by Melville is still worth a lot of money. I love it because it’s something that wasn’t natively possible on the Internet until NFTs, it’s a cool bridge between the openness of creative commons and the monetization authorized by copyrights. I’m curious to see what we’ll build with this.

Any tips for beginners who aspire to work in this domain, but feel completely overwhelmed to even start competing?

It’s very easy to doubt yourself in blockchain. You get a feeling that things are either too easy and don’t make sense, like selling 10,000 NFTs and stealing everyone’s money, or way too hard and require 10 years of development experience in Solidity. You feel left out.

But when you start investigating something in blockchain, you realize there are actually few people putting in the effort. As the saying goes: “it’s still early”. Spending 10 hours learning about an obscure problem in blockchain puts you way ahead of the pack. There’s only a difference in degree rather than in kind between you and the “blockchain geniuses.” It’s so early that small improvements in knowledge or skills actually create a large gap. How many Solidity developers are there? How many people understand what MEV is?

In the beginning I felt like I still had a lot to learn, and until I had learned all of it I wasn’t qualified to speak or build anything. That’s a very French mindset. In an ecosystem as “wild” as blockchain, this doesn’t hold up. Just do something. Almost all of the big blockchain protocols started out as a side project.

The blockchain ecosystem is open by design: You don’t need to apply to IBM or Microsoft to build up experience, you can read Uniswap’s source code on Github, contribute to a DAO, or participate in a hackathon. Anything goes.

It’s an ecosystem with zero barriers to entry. So get in, ask questions, and create something.

What is the question that has not been asked here that you would have enjoyed reading the answer to from one of your peers? Answer it.

I would have loved to know they stopped doubting themselves, when they had an: “ok I’m not dumb that’s actually a good idea” moment. I feel that it’s always something that we forget when thinking about success stories, in retrospect it always feels inevitable.