Good morning: Blockchain is going mainstream

MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, are you blockchain-literate?

“My mind had been marinating overnight — and for more than a year, really — in the abstrusities of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology on which they are built… Some of this stuff I understood; much of it I still did not.” Nick Paumgarten writing in The New Yorker in 2018. I think a lot of us know how he feels.

But blockchain and cryptocurrency aren’t new any more. They emerged together in 2008. Non-fungible tokens are a more recent development, as is Web3, the concept of a blockchain-based decentralized internet (which may or may not be linked to the metaverse). So it’s incumbent on us, I think, to understand these ideas as well as we can, if not at the level of the math and coding.

Even the U.S. government is now trying to understand cryptocurrency — ambitious, perhaps, when politicians so frequently demonstrate a feeble grasp of data privacy and the workings of social media. I guess blockchain and crypto are finally mainstream enough to be regulated.

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

Shorts

The outer limits. Slim Jim, the snack brand, is apparently creating “a meataverse,” a virtual market that will offer virtual foods, presumably to satisfy virtual appetites. Commented musician Loz Kaye, “Surely a PETAverse will follow.”

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.