Blockchain And New Technological Revolution

Abhishek Saxena, Investment Principal of Polygon Ventures will be speaking at the upcoming Benzinga Future Of Digital Assets. Mark Nov. 14 on your calendar for the must-attend gathering in the fintech industry!

After the dot com crash in the early 2000s, the Internet was being called a fad, and hope of it creating an everlasting impact was lost. At that very time, in 2002, Carlota Perez came out with her now widely acclaimed book “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital”. In the book, Perez argues that the Internet was, in fact, not a fad, but we were in the middle of a technological revolution. 

Perez’s thesis was based on over 200 years of history and argued that all technological revolutions follow a similar path. Before the current ICT (Information and communication technology) revolution, we saw four major revolutions, as highlighted below:

Source: The deployment age by Jerry Neimann 

The book states that a typical revolution follows a 50-60-year path divided into installation and deployment periods. The installation period focuses on experimentation and infrastructure buildout, comprising the irruption and frenzy phases. The deployment period sees technology adoption and diffusion and comprises the synergy and maturity phases.

Source: Adopted from: Carlota Perez, 2002. "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital,"

The irruption phase sees startups experiment, with adoption limited to early innovators and government policy being reactive. A frenzy phase follows, with speculative investments surging alongside infrastructure buildout, ending in a bubble and crash. The crash clarifies how the technology can be used productively, enabling the synergy phase as incumbents adopt and scale innovations, accelerating growth. Eventually, the synergy phase leads to the maturity phase, with diffusion slowing, power consolidating, and governments addressing resulting inequality.

The ICT revolution began in 1971 with microprocessors and early standards (TCP/IP. DNS). A frenzy phase followed from 1980-2000 with massive fiber optic buildout, ending in dot com boom and bust. The 2000s-2020 was the synergy phase as Web 2.0, social media, smartphones, and cloud computing took over. We now enter the maturity phase with the internet diffused, power consolidating around major platforms (FAANG), and inequality emerging.

As the ICT revolution matures and new technologies like AI, blockchain, and virtual worlds (metaverse) emerge - it raises the question: which technology will create the next revolution? 

The answer is all of them. A technological revolution is caused not by one technology but by an evolving set of revolutionary technologies and their interrelated system that will transform society.

The ICT revolution removed physical constraints. Information flow became free and democratized, leading to free digital distribution and zero marginal and transaction costs. It enabled an era of abundance where value moved from controlling the distribution of scarce resources to aggregating abundant ones. Aggregators like Google for information, Netflix for media, Facebook for publishers, and Amazon for retail rose to power, centralizing the world. However, the human constraints of time and attention remain in the ICT revolution. Software, art, and media creation still require humans, and we still rely on middlemen (human intervention) to validate transactions. 

The next technological revolution will eliminate the human constraint.

Software, media, and digital goods will be created by AI, eliminating the human cognitive constraints on production. An age of  AI agents will emerge, where AI can make decisions on our behalf. This will create a world of hyper-abundance and near-zero production costs.

However, in a world of hyper-abundance, the only way to create and capture value is to introduce scarcity. Furthermore, AI agents will need to coordinate trustlessly. This is where blockchain technology comes in - allowing the programmatic creation of scarcity and trust through decentralized cryptographic ledgers and tokens. 

Blockchain will contribute to 3 major shifts. First is digital scarcity/ ownership; programmatic creation of scarcity will ascribe value to digital goods and will have application across the media space, from gaming and movies to independent art. The second would be the decentralization of all forms of networks, from ad networks to telecom networks to taxi networks. These trustless networks will distribute profit and power back to users, breaking the centralization of power and inequality created by the ICT revolution. It will also enable AI agents to participate in the network; imagine having your self-driving car added to a decentralized version of Uber maintained by an AI, where payments are on blockchain, and all rules of participation are embedded in a smart contract. The third and more obvious major shift will be making the traditional financial system efficient, making all kinds of transactions nearly instant, enabling it to be a part of the digital realm without human constraint. 

As of now, We have started experimenting with these technologies, and adoption is limited to early adopters, which puts us near the end of the irruption phase. The new technological revolution will take hold as these technologies progress, transforming society. 

Everyone building in space are not just building applications and infrastructure for users, rather they are setting up the foundation of society-transforming revolution happening in front of our eyes. I will be speaking on the autonomous technological revolution at Benzinga’s Future of Digital Assets summit in New York Nov 14th. 

Disclaimers: The information contained in the column represents the views and opinions of the author alone  and does represent the views or opinions of the author's employer or any 3rd party affiliated with the author. 

Abhishek leads infrastructure and defi investments for Polygon ventures. Prior to the current role, Abhishek worked in product at Apple, led product and strategy at Glance building India’s 3rd largest content app, and was part of a startup exit. Abhishek has his MBA from Harvard Business School and did his engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.