The blockchain hype is over. So it’s the perfect time to invest, says this Singapore VC

In a 1999 interview with the BBC, David Bowie shared some of his views about the internet. Though still an emerging technology back then, it was already having a huge impact on the music industry.

“I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. The potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable,” the rock icon said rather prophetically. “The actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything we can really envisage at the moment, where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico that it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”

Twenty years after that interview, Bowie’s predictions about how the internet could revolutionize content have proven remarkably prescient.

Kenrick Drijkoningen, LuneX Ventures founding partner / Photo credit: LuneX Ventures

Lazada and Zalora alumnus Kenrick Drijkoningen sees the same thing happening today – but with blockchain technology standing in for the wider internet, and money taking the place of content.

In October 2018, he became founding partner at LuneX Ventures, a blockchain-focused startup fund affiliated with Singapore-based Golden Gate Ventures, where he previously served as head of growth.

The fund borrows its name from the Lunex Project, a 1950s plan by the US Air Force to put humans on the Moon that predated the Apollo 11 landing by over a decade. The US Air Force’s foresight is something that Drijkoningen and his team are drawing inspiration from as they seek out the big blockchain innovations of tomorrow.

“The reason that we spun out this dedicated fund for LuneX is that we think crypto [and] blockchain are the next iteration of the internet,” Drijkoningen tells Tech in Asia.

“The internet digitized content – so your newspaper, your music, your video, all went from analogue to digital. It’s pretty clear [now that] transition that happened, but it wasn’t that clear in the 1980s and 1990s.”

“Now we [are moving] from digitizing content to digitizing actual assets,” he says.

See: Singapore’s DEXTF wants everyone to be an asset manager

The early internet had “layer one” protocols such as TCP/IP, which essentially enabled the communication of data across the network. Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer were built on top of this first layer, which were themselves followed by another layer comprising applications like Google search, Facebook’s social network, and Netflix’s video streaming.

Blockchain protocols like Bitcoin and Etheruem are today’s “layer one,” and now there’s demand to build infrastructure on top of these. “The services you need in a new system of money are some of the things that already exist in the old world – custodial services, KYC [know-your-customer], wallets, exchanges – all these service companies that enable that next layer, the application layer, where consumers start interacting with it and businesses start using it,” Drijkoningen explains.

Building blocks

As Drijkoningen sees it, the digitization of financial assets – whether money itself or things like real estate, company stocks, bonds, or alternatives like art – could prove even more revolutionary than what the internet has already done with content.

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