Imagine this: you’ve found your dream apartment and you want to close the deal. But instead of dealing with realtors, lawyers, and banks, you just enter a passcode, and you’re done.
“That’s just one example of how I think the blockchain will come to reinvent how business is done and consumer experiences,” Bryan Schreier, partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, told Cheddar.
He says the technology could wipe out layers of inefficiencies and middlemen.
Schreier, who sits on the boards of Dropbox, Thumbtack, and Qualtrics, said he sees a dozen pitches from start-ups in the crypto space every week.
“It reminds us of the early days of the internet…[which] promised to reinvent companies across a number of different industries,” Schreier told Cheddar.
But he cautioned that the world he envisions is probably a decade out. “It’s still very early.”
Threatened by possible shortages of lithium for electric car batteries, automakers are racing to lock in supplies of the once-obscure “white gold” in a politically and environmentally fraught competition from China to Nevada to Chile.
U.S. states could face some hurdles as they experiment with road usage charging programs aimed at one day replacing motor fuel taxes, which are generating less each year, in part due to fuel efficiency and the rise of electric cars.
