Welcome back to our weekly feature: The Future in 5 Questions. Today we have Jonathan Levin — co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Chainalysis, the blockchain intelligence firm that makes investigative tools and publishes reports used widely by governments, banks and businesses. Read on to hear Jonathan’s thoughts about challenging long standing business models like the ad-revenue based internet, the necessity of financial rails for a seamless global economy and how government can leverage open source intelligence. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. What’s one underrated big idea? I think underrated ideas are ones that are not understood well in the full context. For me, that’s universally accessible financial rails. It's almost impossible to think about constructing these rails out of the way that our institutions currently work. All the governments in the world getting together could not construct universally accessible financial rails. It had to have been born out of the creation of a new technology — one that fundamentally meant that no matter what happens, there can be universal access to its rails. And that’s what the innovation behind cryptocurrency has provided us. The big idea is that at the base level of the internet, there needs to be a universally accessible financial protocol. And then in order for it to compete with some of the centralized services that are being offered in traditional finance or FinTech, it needs to be as seamless, as cheap and as easy to use. The interesting thing is that we've seen financial technology companies provide great experiences for individual markets. Think about CashApp or Venmo — they have no penetration in most markets around the world. They're solely a U.S. experience. But because we have some very nice and easy to use financial services, we forget that a world economy — an internet economy — needs to have universally accessible financial rails as one of its key building blocks. What’s a technology you think is overhyped? An internet based on advertising. We have grown up with an internet that is largely based on advertising revenue. That has been driving the evolution of many of the successful players in Web 2.0. But I think we are starting to see how there can be different arrangements of people creating and consuming content that aren’t necessarily going to be included inside an internet based on advertising. And we may see communities and business models shift as the dominance of advertising on the Internet starts to be challenged not only by new business models, but also by regulation and privacy laws. We're in a very, very early cycle of this. But it's very clear that in the future of the Internet — over the medium to long term horizon — there will be other business models. So an internet that's pretty much purely based on advertising seems overhyped. What book most shaped your conception of the future? “Straw Dogs'' by John Gray. It's a book about philosophy and posthumanism. It helped me reframe a lot of the common conceptions about how we as humans live and be very cynical about how humans interact with religion, politics and technology. It made me ask: how different are we actually from animals when we interact with all of these different institutions that we've created for ourselves? It helped me both challenge and dissect very commonly held beliefs about the way the internet works or how our economy functions. And dissecting the way we interact with existing institutions is really how you get to the right answer about the technologies and ideas that will have the most impact in the medium term. What could government be doing regarding tech that it isn’t? So, the government has typically been used to leveraging data that it has collected through surveying citizens and reporting requirements through regulatory obligations. But the government hasn't yet understood and leveraged all of the open source intelligence that it has at its fingertips to help augment its governance of society. In more open and transparent financial systems — like crypto — there is a huge opportunity for the government to understand monetary policy implications in real time and better understand how people are using these financial services. The government needs to look at the policy outcomes that they want to drive: we want a safer financial system, a more inclusive financial system and we want to prevent money laundering. But which of the reporting tools that we’re familiar with in the physical sector can we replace with something that's more effective? For example, the government can actually more proactively look at specific values of transactions if they've got data infrastructure to do that, as opposed to imposing an arbitrary threshold on reporting requirements. There are areas where it is necessary to impose reporting requirements on private companies. But if it’s just sets of transactions that are in the public domain, the government should actually have the technology to inspect that more closely and target the collection of information to protect consumer data and actually more effectively go after money laundering. What has surprised you most this year? The resilience of the crypto markets in the wake of FTX. When you focus on the number of people that are still building companies — if you look at a lot of the early stage companies that are still being produced inside the crypto economy — there's still a lot going on. A lot of that activity is actually increasing post-FTX and back to previous levels. The sector has become a lot more resilient than I thought it would be. And that's an exciting piece of what may lie ahead in the next one to two years. | 
