Web3 and a digital space for your crypto assets

Do you remember “Cyberspace”?

We don’t think much about that term these days, but it was a whole new space in the early days of the internet. Things had meaningful addresses, much like physical addresses. There were even references, aka links, that could connect places together. In a URL, the L stands for location. Everything had its place.

In physical space, everything is connected through reference space. Everything has a uniqueness and location with spatial orientation to everything else. Your cup is on your desk. Your pen is next to your cup. Your phone is in your pocket.

Time vs. space with the blockchain

Crypto hasn’t invaded the digital space until now. Blockchains only validate WHEN something happened, not where it happened. Until now, crypto has kind of only existed in time. A blockchain is literally a timeline, a sequence of verifiable events.

Of course there are addresses in crypto; Addresses related to the public keys of the public-private key pairs you keep in your wallet. These relate to people, but they don’t have much to do with each other.

Verifiable time and sequencing for digital activity is a relatively new phenomenon and what makes blockchain so unique. It is an immutable, verifiable moment of activity like a transaction. Originally designed to ensure that nobody can spend something they don’t have, blockchains act as a timeline on which everything verifiable happened – perhaps similar to Loki’s sacred timeline in the Marvel Universe.

So if blockchain is “time”, how do we create a crypto “space”? And what could we do with crypto “rooms”?

Digital space: a home for crypto and NFTs

Companies like Decentraland have tried to integrate the digital space with the blockchain, but it’s a very different idea than a general crypto cyberspace. Decentraland is more focused on digital trading and delivery of NFT-based real estate, not the overarching need for a true physical crypto space. Ditto for companies like Sandbox who are more concerned with asset monetization rather than creating a real home on the internet for any type of asset to live in and relate to others.

When you think of storage space in Web2, everything has a URL. This URL acts as a location that has a potential relationship to every other URL via links. In Web3, we’re just beginning to see domains like .eth domains as URLs. You can tie your crypto address to this domain and use, for example, alice.eth instead of the standard hexadecimal “0x-” address to receive funds. These domains will be like the beginnings of “space” at “time” of the blockchain. With domain NFTs, you collect metadata from transactions that populate your domain’s history.

Organize your crypto space

But next comes the full URLs, the part after “.com/” in Web2 or after “.eth/” in Web3. That means you can start organizing crypto; You can start organizing NFTs and other tokens in this crypto space just like you would organize things in a file storage or database.

And you can store tokens and data in a “location” in the Web3 URL. You could model physical structures so that any room could contain NFTs, just like a room in the physical world can contain objects. You can model almost anything in the 3D space we all live in, with verifiable time and history. We’re working on that with some great use cases.

Of course, organizing crypto-enabled data in this way also means that virtual realms can be much more decentralized.

Leonard Kish is co-founder of the Cortex App.