- Play-to-earn crypto will be the only type of games most people play in five years, according to Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian.
- "90% of people will not play a game unless they are being properly valued for that time," he said in a recent podcast.
- He also expects most people will unknowingly participate in DAOs five years down the line.
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Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian thinks the play-to-earn crypto phenomenon will be routine for gamers in five years.
"90% of people will not play a game unless they are being properly valued for that time," Ohanian, who runs venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, said in a recent episode of the "Where It Happens" podcast.
"In five years, you will actually value your time properly," he said. "And instead of being harvested for advertisements, or being fleeced for dollars to buy stupid hammers you don't actually own, you will be playing some on-chain equivalent game that will be just as fun, but you'll actually earn value and you will be the harvester."
Play-to-earn games are a crypto-powered virtual realm that grew in popularity around the world in 2021. Gaming worlds, like Axie Infinity and The Sandbox, use cryptocurrencies as in-game currencies.
Gaming is one of the biggest use-cases in the metaverse, a futuristic virtual world that enables players to build, own, and monetize their gaming experiences on the ethereum blockchain using the platform's in-game utility token.
Notably, a quarter of Axie players have never had access to a bank account before, meaning their Axie wallets are the first financial services they've been able to access.
Crypto industry experts expect to see an increase in the adoption of popular gaming franchises and more players around the world flocking to play-to-earn games in 2022. Decentraland's MANA cryptocurrency currently has the highest market value among play-to-earn tokens, according to CoinMarketCap.
Aside from a play-to-earn boom, Ohanian shared two other predictions.
According to him, most people will participate in a DAO, or a decentralized autonomous organization, in the next five years. A DAO is a fancy term for what refers to a bunch of internet contacts coming together for a common purpose, such as in the case of the ConstitutionDAO, where people clubbed together to try to buy an original copy of the US Constitution.
"They won't know it necessarily. I don't think that branding is whack," he said. "But they won't care, user experience triumphs over everything. So yeah, I think it will be pretty commonplace. Maybe not everyone, but like for all intents and purposes, it'll be a pretty normal thing."
He also expects people to have more regard for their online identities than real-world ones, saying "they'll care more about some pseudonym they made up than their government name."
