‘The free-flowing internet of everything’

Duckbucks: The concept of the “Internet of Value” has seen more than a few cycles of hype and speculation. What would a mature ecosystem look like, and what are some of the roadblocks in getting there?

Jon Wong: The way that I express this often is that the internet is incredibly good at data transfer, but incredibly bad at value transfer. And value transfer encompasses a lot of different things. People consider it only to be the payments side of things — there’s an internet-adjacent set of payment rails that are effectively too old to evolve quickly and adapt to today’s world. The internet as we see it today facilitates payments flows, but it doesn’t allow you to innovate on those payments flows. Blockchain gives you that speed and efficiency, which is incredibly important, being able to literally get value from one place to the other around the world without having to deal with the antiquated financial system. So, the Internet of Value is quite important.