“My 8-year-old kid doesn't even know what the internet is”

“I think right now is like going back 25 years ago when people started asking about what the internet is and how it will affect our lives; there were some objections mainly by organizations that are more traditional,” explained Fireblocks Co-founder and CTO Idan Ofrat, whose company provides a digital asset custody, transfer and settlement platform, arguing that views on blockchain and web3 mirror those of internet-skeptics from the 1990s.

He continued: “Some of them said they didn't want to have anything on the internet, and some of them said they wanted something that was in between, they called it the intranet. Now, my 8-year-old kid doesn't even know what the internet is. Everything is the internet. When she goes online she texts with her friends on WhatsApp or when she watches stuff on YouTube, she uses the internet as the underlying infrastructure.”

Ofrat predicts that in 5-10 years, there will be a new layer of the internet called web3 which will host financial services provided by companies like Fireblocks. “I think that some organizations are either afraid of this change and they object to it for the wrong reasons, or some of them have pretty good arguments regarding regulation. But this is also going to change. We are also part of trying to get the regulators to be more comfortable with the technology,” he concluded.

You can watch the entire exchange in the video above.