Unbounded with Unlimited Reality To NFT or Not To - hype or a gamechanger
Hello, thank you for dialing in and I would be remiss if I do not say that happy May the 4th, and may the force be with you. My name is Frances Yu, and I am the Global Lead and General Manager for Deloitte's Unlimited Reality Business. What is Unlimited Reality? It is a business group that we have, Deloitte is specifically focusing on helping our clients navigating all the crescendo of new technologies under the banners of Metaverse, NFT, Web3. Now speaking of the new technologies and the next generation of the internet, we would be remiss if we don't talk about NFT.
And today, you're tuning in for a discussion, a candid discussion around to NFT or not to. And here, with great pleasure, I'm joined by my colleagues, Scott, Wendy, and Hanish. Hey Frances, Scott Mager, thanks for listening in today. My background, I'm a bit, sit oddly at the center of creative and technology, started my career off as a creator, creative designer, creative director, helped start one of the first digital agencies back in the mid‐90s, in the Web 1.0 days and then joined Deloitte in 2000 as we were ramping up, and then helped build our Deloitte digital business in the Web 2.0 days, and I recently just transitioned to be
the Chief Marketing Officer of Deloitte Consulting. Hi, I'm Wendy Henry, it's a great pleasure to be here today. I'm global lead for our consulting blockchain and digital assets group, been a career long hands on technologist, got involved with blockchain back in 2013, so I've been at this for a while, and it's been a wild and crazy ride, and the advent of NFTs now adding to that incredible journey, so looking forward to talking about it today. Hi, everyone, this is Hanish Patel, really excited to talk to you today about the topic of NFTs. I spent a lot of my time when it comes to technology, future trends, and what's going to be emerging for our firm, and also one of our leaders in our media and entertainment practice. And given that media and entertainment are some of the forebearers of what's happening in the NFT space, super excited to talk to you all about what we're seeing in the market.
Lovely. So NFT, Non‐Fungible Token, and if I just look at what it is, it's a unit of data on digital ledger called blockchain. I candidly cannot think of a more neutral term describe piece of technology. Yet this is a term that somehow managed to polarize, somehow managed some people think NFT is absolutely a villain, some think it's a hero and some... So Hanish, help us understand a little bit,
unpack a little bit, how did we get here? Sure, so I'm actually going to take us back a good number of years. Some of you may actually be surprised when I say I could go far back and say 2015 with the likes of the Terra Nullius NFT or 2016 with PixelMap, but it was really in 2017 when the ERC 721 standard was created that really established that standard for NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. And this led to the launch of say early NFT art and projects such as CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties and these being digital images with different combinations and characteristics, and frankly rarity. And it's really like 2018 that we saw the likes of
Axie Infinity, which is a play to earn gaming, which really kind of brought that coming into existence and using NFTs, and then I'll fast forward us a little bit more to probably big catalysts that really increased the hype and the news around NFTs, and one of those being the famous artist, Beeple. When he sold his piece of artwork as an NFT through Christie's for $69 million, and that's right, you did hear it correctly, $69 million. And then you had Top Shots when that launched, and that was really a marketplace for buying and selling NBA digital moments. And all the way to where we are in most recent terms where most of you, no doubt, have heard about the Bored Apes are purchasing a parcel of virtual real estate, like many brands and celebrities have done. And at that point really NFTs crossed the chasm into more sort of mainstream attention, with early use cases, really did revolve around art and collectibles.
However, this is just really scratching the surface on what we're seeing today as brands, content creators are exploring the ways to leverage NFTs for new experiences and forms of engagement. And from an ownership perspective, we're seeing a number of categories right now, which I'm sure will continue to evolve and added to. There's the one that obviously garners a lot of column inches and speculation. Think of that as purchasing and flipping your NFT for profit. I mean, last year alone we saw sales of NFTs hitting $25 billion. Then there's the one that I call the digital flex or the digital good of ostentation, think of that as your profile pic and we've seen so many more of those in social media as well. Then there's product, and that by owning a
given NFT, you're get an associated physical product. And then there's fandom and that could be access for certain NFT that gives you…associate to an IP or a particular artist. And finally, I see that there's also access for an event or an experience or being part of a community where you get the alpha or you could be on the white list of something. So that's a bit of a whirlwind tour there, Frances, of where things started to what we're seeing today.
Yeah, definitely sounds like a complete Shakespeare in three seconds and it's been quite an evolution of NFT. Now, Wendy I know you've been in this ecosystem for a long time, so perhaps in your own words also for our audience, define what is NFT. Sure. So NFT stands for Non‐fungible Token and really what it is,
is the instantiation of bits of code that are actually put onto the ledger, the blockchain, the distributed ledger. It abides by a standard, as Hanish said of the ERC‐721, and so that means that there's a standard that says that bit of code will abide by certain facets of data that will be on their constructs, etc., and what some of the functions that can occur with that are. And that's what an NFT is, what's different about the nonfungible token to a fungible token right, is the same as a dollar, every dollar is the same, it's very fungible you can exchange one for the other. With a non‐fungible currency or a non‐fungible token, they are each unique, and there is something that defines them to be unique, and so that is a nonfungible token, NFT.
Again, this is a kind of thing that if you ask my teenager kids to take a test on that, they might get a 50% because they give me like Oh! my gosh it's just so technical, right? And again, going back to the heroes and villains and what are some of the…why do folks have, some of literally have "visceral reactions" to NFT or applied use of NFT? So what are some of the misconceptions or some of the real concerns that you see around NFT? Yeah, sure, there are a couple of them. And actually, I was having a conversation this morning and one of them came up, which is first and foremost, that there's the potential for a large environmental impact in the minting or the creating, we call it when we create an NFT minting and then when we destroy an NFT we call it burning, just to give you a little bit more of the nomenclature, but I got to ask the same thing this morning was isn't this bad for the economy? And after that they generally quote it uses more…I've heard it uses more energy than, and I always wait for what the name of the country is going to be because it changes. It was Argentina and I thought, oh it's getting bigger. And that is very much a concern with certain components of certain blockchains. So there is an environmental
cost when NFTs are minted using certain blockchains. And that's because blockchains have a consensus mechanism, which is really a way that the group agrees upon what constitutes a valid transaction before it gets written to the ledger. And there is a consensus mechanism called proof of work, which uses a very energy intensive method of coming to that agreement amongst all the members, that something is ready to be written to the chain. What's important to
understand is that there are, Ethereum today is the largest platform for NFTs, and it does use proof of work, but there is Ethereum 2.0 coming, as a matter of fact, it's already in play. When they did the release of the first phase, which was beacon chain, and the second phase, which will really move it to proof of stake is now targeted for Q2 in 2022. In the meantime though, it's important to understand
that there are other blockchains that NFTs are being minted on and there are a lot of reasons that those are getting large upswings, so, Cardano, Solana, Flow are just a couple. They already use different consensus mechanisms, mostly proof of stake, but there are some like Solana uses both proof of history and proof of stake. Those are much less energy intensive when it comes to either minting or the handling of NFTs. So that's the first thing, is large environmental impact and as I said yes, and there are other ways to do it and there is also a shift to try and move away from those more energy intensive consensus mechanisms. The next thing, and I think this is
important for all and I think a couple of us might have already kind of felt the ding of this as well is that people say, well, aren't NFTs a cash grab or a scam? And I think it's important to understand with any new technology, right, there's always going to be opportunistic entrants who are going to use the technology in a manner that is not the way it's supposed to be used and they're just looking for an opportunity for quick cash or to actually use it for malfeasance. So, I think with NFTs, some of the most common things we've seen are, you might have heard the term rug pulls, which are really when false promises are made and then people will leave with the money. So they'll take your money with false promises, they'll basically then not deliver what it is they said they were going to deliver, and they'll take those funds. Okay, it's a bit of a Wild West on this one, and actually Scott, you've been…as a technology early adopter enthusiast, tell us a bit about your experience there.
Yeah. Well, look as with anything , I mean, I've been playing in this space for years, I was mining cryptocurrency for years going back, so I know this space pretty well, but to really get deep into the NFT space, I put a couple of thousand dollars of my own money into a whole bunch of different projects, just to learn how the transactions flowed, how the communities work, what was working, what wasn't working. And I got to tell you I lost a few thousand dollars just in bad projects and rug pulls to Wendy's point, but also through just some of the discords getting hacked and putting in wrong addresses really easy things that I consider myself pretty darn savvy in this space and still lost money learning how this whole thing works, so it's definitely a bit of the Wild West out there still.
Yeah. And Wendy, how are folks addressing that? You talked about environmental challenges and the players are actually actively addressing this, so what are some of the things you're seeing folks are looking at this in terms of how to minimize the risk of participation? Yeah, there is actually quite a few things going on, the community is really starting to pull together. They're trying to develop a playbook and in some of the cases, much like the one you add to that, they are often raising funds and then recompensing people who have been scammed, so that's one thing, but we're also seeing some of the tools and platforms that are reacting. So MetaMask to the point of the Discord channels and the ability to take over your screen and pretend like their customer service when they're not, then what they'll do is take a picture of the QR code and that has your keys, so then they'll have your keys they'll go in and they'll empty your wallet of all your NFTs. So MetaMask has come to the table, and they've
temporarily disabled the QR code scan capability. We've seen OpenSea add an SOS button, so that if you think that all of a sudden like oh! I'm in a bad situation, you can hit the SOS button and it will freeze things, so nothing can be moved in and out of your account. So there are things that are happening as the different schemes are kind of uncovered, the platforms and tools and community are reacting. So what are the other in terms of some of the concerns around NFT? Yeah, so I think the next biggest one is, okay, yeah, these are great, there are pictures, but there just really isn't any real utility to them like why am I going to do this? And I think that comes back to the thing that I think the first thing when we think about NFTs is the digital collectibles or art, and some of the fun things out there that we've seen but okay, that's great it's static. It's a static digital asset, no inherent utility, but I think even with the collectibles, what everybody needs to understand is what's going on behind that, that there is now an embedded ability that allows the creators and the artists to not only access broader markets, but now they retain those ownership rights. So there's the ability to code into the NFT that as
that asset is resold, 10%, 5% whatever gets coded in there, is now going to revert back to the original creator. It has ways that you can creatively transfer those now. There's the ability to even look at the authenticity of it, and so that way there's utility that's built into these that I don't think a lot of the individuals are starting to see, but I think the other thing is that it goes well beyond just the collectibles. There are broader use cases for these NFTs that demonstrate even more utility than what I just discussed like we're actually implementing it to automate NFTs contract terms, so we will create an NFT of a specific contract. There might be an NFT that allows
entry to special events or the ability to actually buy a special version of a tangible product, interact with sports figures. There's a lot of other uses for NFTs that we're starting to see the market, get their head around, and then start to implement. And kind of playing off of that when I think the last thing is and this goes back, I think a lot to the digital collectibles as well is like, well, I can just copy that. And I think again, just thinking back to the fact that this is sort of implemented through some code that's put onto the blockchain is, while you can take a picture of that collectible, what you don't have is, you don't have two things. One is most importantly, there's an
ownership component that's associated with an NFT, and that ownership then allows you to transfer the NFT. I think the other thing that's important is that there's the ability to associate authenticity with the asset and that too is built into the construct of the NFT, and so when you just take a picture of it, that authenticity or that ownership isn't there to allow you to actually transact and/or see the authenticity of the NFT. So I think those are probably the most‐broad places that we see people kind of giving us the, well, this is why NFTs are not really worth my time or energy.
Right, and like any technologies, once we start getting a more nuanced understanding around what is the core of the utility and apply that in a way that's trustworthy, it then becomes interesting. It's technology in use and deliver value. So Scott, I actually would love just to turn this to you and share with us some of the things, areas where you're seeing that utility being applied for good use. Yeah sure. And by the way let me start off by saying while the utility
is very important, there's also a debate out in the market on art versus utility, and not every NFT has to have utility to have value. So I'll touch on that maybe last, but just to start off, I think NFTs are really good for anything as Wendy you just sort of said, anything that needs transparency in the transaction chain, and anything that needs to be verified and there's a whole bunch of use cases that we're seeing all over the place, at a high level, Wendy mentioned digital collectibles, digital goods, the metaverse. I think there's a huge opportunity and we're seeing a lot of traction out in the market, minted consumer goods that represent clothing or fashion and digital art format for sale on, auctions or on OpenSea or the new Coinbase platform, we're starting to see digital land and brands represented in digital land sold on the metaverse. Louis Vuitton has a super interesting game that they've just launched where you're not necessarily buying, but you're accumulating NFTs the more that you interact with them and play the game, and I'll talk a little bit more about first party data in a moment. I think Time Inc's TIMEPiece is a super interesting application in the digital collectible space, NBA Top Shots, and also the ability to create tokenized ticketing solutions and capitalize on tickets and ticket resale.
Alpha wallet, they tokenized 20,000 FIFA tickets, that was a little while ago this past Super Bowl, I think we saw tokenized Super Bowl tickets and in the music space, I think just last week there was a Brooklyn rapper Bobby Shmurda, he dropped the first full single as an NFT last week and that whole disintermediation of going direct with music and having the artist have direct benefit from the sale of their art is super interesting and that might be one of the examples that we get into, where maybe there is some utility there, but there's also just the subjective value of the art. Another category, Frances, consumer and fan engagement where consumers can purchase NFTs that allow them access to something, access to a DAO, being able to vote on things in the DAO or to influence how apparel gets created. I think Adidas is doing something interesting there where they've sold an NFT that provides access to their Adidas Originals, and that gives you access to collaboratively design physical goods. I have not personally gotten into that one because I wouldn't show up in those clothes, it just they don't fit me. They don't work on me in my office, but one of our
partners as you know, Frances, Adam got deep into the Adidas space. And I think Yuga Labs and the ApeCoin DAO is probably the greatest example of selling digital art and creating an entire business model that DAO is directing right now and when you buy into that in any of their projects, you're buying into the ability to influence and participate in that. And that pivot of being an audience interacting with the digital platform to pivoting to ownership in a digital platform and being a collaborator in that, I think it's just super interesting, it's a whole different paradigm of engagement that Web 3.0 gives and we can get into that a tiny bit more. Gaming is big obviously, play to earn functionality, creating virtual environments that get integrated into metaverse games, mintable real estate inside of games, things like Decentraland and Sandbox. Nike buying their RTFKT that does the virtual sneaker NFTs, and with Yuga Labs again, Yuga Labs, the other side decentralized metaverse that's just been announced and getting built, I think it's super interesting in the gaming space right now. And then where I started this thing off
around anything that needs to be transparent or verified on the blockchain, physical product authentication, I think this is where Wendy was going. Real estate is primed here, automobile sales is primed here, anything in the third‐party logistics space, health care on some of the blockchains, potential for voting in the future, Identification numbers like a Social Security number or a driver's license and of course talk about transparency and verification, I think the art community, one of the most nontransparent businesses in the world where value is questionably set sometimes. I think the community is setting the value of art today and it's verifiable on the blockchain, and artists didn't always have a path to market the way that they do now in this mass path to market. So while consumers
have a much more interesting path to buy art, I think artists have such an interesting way to put their art in front of people and to sell it and when you talked about the utility of being able to retain a portion of future sales and royalties whether it's music or photography or graphic design and the work that people does as an example I think is wild. There's just, it's such a Wild West around art there's people putting out fake projects and there's a lot of the art projects are beautiful, but there's a bunch of them that are being quite driven by greed quite frankly. So you have to be prepared getting into that space that if you're going to buy a piece of art, you better love it and if it becomes worth something at some point in time, that's a benefit, but you have to be happy with how it sits on the wall. Yeah, I think Scott, you touched on something that's truly heart of all of the conversation and candidly, this heart of how Deloitte Unlimited Reality and how we approach the business side, it is not just about technology, it's always about the convergence of technologies and how it facilitates behavioral shifts, and similarly, how the culture movements, the behavioral shifts, how it call upon certain aspects or certain utilities in this case, for example, the spectrum of utilities of NFT that can be applied to enable to make human interactions that shifts that meaningful make it real. So I think as we're looking at the
whole space of Metaverse, Web3, the part that we're watching closely are the convergence of culture, of demographics, of the how users fundamentally shifting the behavior, and how technology is empowering that. And that also gets into an interesting thing, so I'm going to ask the two parts. One part I'm going to channel to Scott, back to you. And one part I'm going to channel, just to give Wendy
a tee up, is around taking in your role, Scott as the Deloitte US Consulting CMO, how are you seeing all those convergence of culture, behavior and NFT, Web3, and Metaverse, as you're looking at from the lens of CMO, how might this be helpful to what you do? Sure. Well, I'll maybe riff a tiny bit on the shift in consumer behavior here I think, and then and just talk about some questions that I have as a CMO, but I do think there's this really interesting shift that I just sort of alluded to, where people would interact with websites as an audience member. They would join it, maybe subscribe to it, read it, be a participant in it, and then there is this whole backend marketing approach to who was that person, what did they look at, can I collect some data on them and how do I market to them in the future? I think this shift toward NFT, it's a very fundamental shift in behavior because people are not just, they're not just participants or audiences, they're actually investing their own money into the digital asset and they're participating in the community that's creating it, that's supporting it and they become not just a participant, but a brand ambassador and in many cases, a creator on top of that and they're all in. You don't have to convince them, and the fact that
they've bought into an NFT, they're on the blockchain. In many cases, they've shared their wallet in exchange for access. We know who they are now, and they're willingly giving that information about who they are over to the community and that's not something that exists in the physical world very easily, and it's becoming harder and harder in the traditional Web 2.0 world with GDPR and CCPA and cookies going away. So I think there's this really interesting shift on how marketing will pivot and how consumer engagement will pivot as consumer behavior pivots to this new model. So people are basically saying it's okay to engage with me because I'm invested here and I'm getting some value out of it. So how that evolves? I think we're
watching very closely, but I think the paradigm of first party data is shifting and it's really interesting here. I mean the other things that I'm thinking about, I think that other CMOs should be thinking about is, are NFTs representing my brand in a new way? Are they creating new products and services for our business? Is it positioning my existing products and services differently? Top Shots, I think is a great example of how the NBA's monetizing footage and building community and creating new access to collectibles and it was something that they had and they're creating a whole new business model around it using this. So that's an interesting paradigm. Is there a new business paradigm, is there a way to embolden our audience and turn them into creators and get them invested in the brand and the business in essence to build the brand further? And then lastly, are we protecting our brand? Are we being ethical, are we being responsible, the topic of the environment, are we putting something up that has real value or are we just trying to make a quick buck? Is the community going to benefit from this, or are we just going to try are we just going to be making money off it? I think you're going to see CMOs, brands and businesses pivoting away from this, can we make a quick buck versus really creating this engaged community in this integrated sort of customer business model, so I think it's really interesting. Yeah, absolutely. And I think for each brand, the notion of fostering that engagement, direct engagement, and being highly responsible in brand innovation as we're looking at all aspects of first party data, zero party data, how do we truly think this whole topic through is critical to us, and also I think Scottie also hit on a number of the hopes and fears, the fear factor, right? So Wendy I'd love just to get your commentary in terms of what are some of the corporate level of fears, concerns that we should be really looking intensely focused on? Yeah, and that brand is so important, right? It's the everything that the companies hold near and dear to themselves. And so the biggest things we see clients focusing in on as far as spheres go, there's 3 from the technology side and then there's two from the more business factored sides. So on the technology side,
it's obviously still nascent and emerging. And so it's hard to say one, whether we're truly ready for the interoperability and the scaling that are really necessary. Like when you talked about Top Shot, there was a problem right in being able to handle the demand that happened at the very beginning there. And when you have things like
that happen, what does that do to your brand, right? Interoperability, there's a lot of NFT platforms if you can't move between them, do you end up sort of forfeiting NFTs at that point? And then all of the different NFT platforms in the ways you can go to market, they're backed by blockchains, right? So which of those blockchains is really going to be the winner, or does there need to be one? And then the third thing is security. We talked a little bit about the scams and the rug pulls and all of that. The good part is that we are seeing, as I said before, not only from the bad actors parts of it, but we're seeing a lot on interoperability scaling, the ability to really provide a secure mechanism behind these things. So the community and the tools and the platforms are really coming of age, I just think that they're still worried they're not all the way there. And then if
you move out of the technology, I think the next largest conversation that we have and we're having these daily with CFOs is hey regulation seems to be a little bit hazy on what is the IT, right? What is the NFT, and that really has everything to do with how you're implementing the NFT and the regulation is starting to evolve, right? We saw the executive order come out in early March, but as all of that is sort of evolving, the thing they're most they're most focused on is what are my tax implications and how do I have to look at this from an accounting perspective? And it's important. One of the things that we found and thankfully, we have some great clients who understand the importance of having that enter the conversation super, super early, right? So that you're preparing the way you're going to go to market and how you're going to protect the brand by making sure that you're taking the tax and accounting considerations up front. But those are really the big ones. Yeah that's so well said I would hit on with Hanish, part of the practice that you lead around Unlimited Reality that really takes as we're thinking about the problems that we think together with Deloitte the tax professionals, consulting professionals, as well as our cyber risk advisory professionals. So if you can just share with our audience how you and the practice are helping clients solve some of the real gnarly problems, or driving growth agenda. I'd love to hear your voice and your experiences on that.
Sure, happy to. I'd probably put it in how we're helping our clients in three key things in this space, right? The first being is really help them make those strategic choices about how they approach Web3 as a whole, right? And that's including the discovery labs, the kind of Web3 strategic development part, how they'd address the topic of today NFTs, crypto custody and enterprise blockchain solutions at a real holistic level. Then I'd say number two is really around sort of that designing, building and launching those kind of Web3 initiatives. And again, that includes our topic around NFT today and the whole concept around metaverse type of design, kind of the whole venture and the launching of these services, the marketing, the community management that's been touched upon, a real kind of technical strategy and delivery of that. And then in the third I'd say, it's really around helping them develop the capabilities that ultimately they themselves can become the real leaders and innovators in what's happening in Web3. And (?)(37:13)
that is for our Web3 incubation services, the partnerships and the ecosystems that we also developing. And with that as you mentioned, it's across cyber, it's across risk, and all the controls that need to be in place as well. So really I look at it ideation, strategy, build, risk, tax implementation through to marketing. And the key thing I'd say Frances is, we're acutely aware of some of the big signature issues that are present when it comes to NFTs such as that (?)(37:44) and brand extension. That digital asset ownership, metaverse commerce, and again that's cyber, the tax, the reporting side of it. And likewise, you know well aware top of mind of the use
cases that our clients are looking for when it comes to at least NFTs. And I'll give just a few…sprinkle at of some of the examples, right. One of those is around consumer and community management. Think of that as how the NFTs are allowing those content creators, those brands to really engage directly with the consumers, the overall community offering incentives, rewards for holders, kind of like loyalty. Second, be an enterprise engagement, really gamifying the
corporate recognition and reward system and unlocking corporate digital identity through on‐chain credentialization. Third one being things around digital asset commerce, designing and creating NFTs for consumption for use in virtual worlds and games. For example, maybe virtual clothing or in‐game assets. And then I'd also say around sort of the product than experience authentication, that's really the tracking and the tracing of physical as well as digital items to ensure their authenticity and trust.
It's really helpful this whole conversation and it's to help us understand whilst there's a lot of discussion and well warranted debates around NFT, the core of the utilities are being applied to some really meaningful domains right? Now if I could ask Scott, Wendy, Hanish, just on a quick boxing round, what do you see five year out the role of NFT? I don't know Frances, I mean, I think, as in web 1.0 there were thousands of new companies and thousands of new innovations and many of them stuck, few of them stuck and turned into the foundation of what is digital today, I think we'll see something similar, right? I think NFTs will become the center and the basis for digital transactions and experiences, and a new digital economy I think some of the things that we're seeing some of the examples we just talked about, I think we'll stick and evolve into new things. And some of them will go away, but it's really hard to predict precisely what it'll be. But it's not going anywhere I can tell you that, it's foundational.
Yeah, I would add on to that where I really think we're at the tip of the iceberg of the potential use cases. And I think people are really starting to get their head around the art of the possible. And getting to my favorite imagine a world where, how these things really can change the way we engage on so many fronts. So I am with you Scott I think it's hard to tell, but I think there are some new and wonderful things out there and coming.
I'd echo the comments of Scott and Wendy I mean five years from now Frances that's quite a crystal ball right you're asking. But I'd look at it as I've seen some reports on the NFT market just even a couple of years out from now is going to be something like $80 billion. And that even outside of these projections, that one thing I'll say they're definitely going to be around, but I think their success will ultimately revolve around content, community, and utility. And in those initial stages that you really think it's about removing friction to onboard users into even acquiring an NFT. Right now you start with Fiat, move it into crypto,
get it into your wallet, and then we've talked about gas fees, etc. You start removing some of these barriers, I think ultimately you're going to get more and more people comfortable with how they can be used, how they can be applied, which will lead to greater adoption at both the enterprise and consumer level. So thank you my panelists it is May the 4th, so the comment about new and wonderful to come is very appropriate. I support you. I am going to take a few questions from the audience.
And first one is Roberto from Italy. Thank you for asking the question the question is, what about the 3D applications with NFTs? I think it's a great evolution that we've seen from I'll call it your initial just flat digital image and we're seeing more and more of that take place. And I think again, I'm somewhat biased because I work in the media and entertainment space. But I think gaming is leading a lot of that on the forefront of what we're seeing around the use of NFTs, the evolution around 3D aspects of it and again, I mentioned up front around things like Axie Infinity and the growth around play to earn or what I like to call play and earn.
You are seeing more and more of that being applied. So I can only imagine that will continue to be applied through the use of NFTs and further extrapolation in the 3D assets as well. And if I could just add to that, can I just add real quick to what Hanish said, and Hanish was mostly focused on the consumer side of this around gaming, but enterprise simulation and digital twins and building 3D simulations I think is an enormous, enormous benefit and opportunity for business. Totally agree with Scott.
And that sums up what we are also doing at a Unlimited Reality practice at Deloitte. So the next question it's a question from AJ from the UK. The question is for the panelists so do you know how or when do you see NFT replace the conventional market? It's a little loaded question, so go ahead. Well, I don't know when, right? I don't the exact answer to when but you can see a world where distributed, and I think that's probably the topic for a whole other live session here, but you could see a world where distributed autonomous organizations can begin to replace corporate models at some point in the future. So I think it's very interesting, it's a good question.
It's a very good question. And Wendy, your take and maybe we'll close after that. Yeah, I think the important things are it will make an impact on markets, I don't know what that timing is. And I do agree with Scott that deep diving into DAOs, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and how that is going to sort of come together and play, would be a super interesting deep dive that might shed some light but I'm not sure it'll give you the date of when that's going to occur.
I mean, that's a real tough one in terms of where it is. But I think it's going to be an interesting space to watch, in terms of the wider adoption and how is it used differently. And I don't think there's going to be the equivalent of a silver bullet, that's going to be that seminal moment. I think it would just continue
to grow and it'll get applied in different ways that I imagine a lot of us can't even think about right now, right? It will get applied in very different ways. And I start to think about this future is perhaps not a calendar marker, but rather the degree to which we have started seeing step function change when you have culture, society, technology converge and drive a real pivot. So with that, I know we're at time. I really appreciate all the questions, I recognize we did not get to all the questions being proposed in the chat window and we will absolutely be happy to take all those questions offline. Thank you for tuning in. And last but not least, thanks Scott, Wendy, Hanish for spending the time with us on this Unbound channel and yeah, may the force be with you. (end)
2022-07-28