Exclusive Trusted Magazine Q&A with Shermin Voshmgir, Founder @Token Kitchen
How could you describe your career path in a few words?
I originally studied Information Systems Management at the Vienna University of Economics, went on to work for a big consulting company and later as a research assistant at university, before changing my career path and moving to Madrid where I studied filmmaking.
Under my alter ego KAMIKAT.SE I created a series of audio visual works over the scope of 10 years. During that time I moved to Berlin, where I started working for a film making startup and discovering the tech world - and ultimately also Bitcoin and Web3. Back in 2015 I founded the BlockchainHub in Berlin, went on to be the director of the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics.
My book “Token Economy“ has been a bestseller since the first edition. I am urrently working on the third edition of the book. Together with my partner, I am also setting up a data driven farm in Portugal (Monte dos Dados) where we investigate how to tokenize sustainable ecosystem services such as soil quality or CO2 capture with the support of hardware wallets and sensor technology - all with the aim to create additional revenue streams for farmers.
What are the highlights of the key digital innovation trends for 2022? Can you
give us some major examples?
Metaverse and Virtual Reality (VR) was a bit overhyped at the beginning of 2022. Companies like Meta (formerly Facebook) emphasised the development of the metaverse, an immersive virtual reality environment with social and economic elements.
Though I believe VR applications will become more and more dominant, we are not quite there yet. The rollout of 5G networks was a continuous game changer as it enables faster and more reliable wireless connectivity - with many downstream effects on the application landscape. We have also seen a rise in precision farming technologies and other sustainable aka eco-friendly technologies - from renewable energy, electric vehicles, and eco-conscious consumer products.
Obviously everyone was impressed by the breakthrough in Machine Learning applications such as LLMs that created useful applications that anyone can easily understand and use - such as ChatGPT, and before that DALL-E and now Midjourney.
Based on your experiences, what are the impactful trends in digital innovationthat are becoming more important in the context of 2023?
While crypto seems a bit dead, like IoT an outdated topic - this is only what we see on the surface through the lense of traditional media and social media - which tend to follow the most hyped topics at the time, often ignoring the realities of technology implementation. Crypto aka Web3 is not dead, neither is IoT. None of these technologies work in isolation, but intersect and complement each other. As Web3 matures and AI becomes more powerful, we will see more and more integration on an application level. Take the example of what we are doing on our farm where we investigate the tokenization of agricultural assets & sustainable ecosystem services such as soil quality, water retention, biodiversity maintenance, or CO2 sequestration using hardware wallets and sensor technology. We use data driven farming practices and tokenization to generate publicly verifiable sustainability-proofs that can provide additional revenue streams for farmers -such as the sale of tokenized CO2 certificates. To do that we are implementing a prototype on the intersection of AI, Web3 and IoT.
In your opinion, how can they create high value for organizations?
Depends on how you define an organization. An organization is run by people who want to get paid for their work and capital they invested. I think the question that the people who run these organizations need to ask is, how do these technologies and trends create a high value for people who buy products and services from these organizations. Technology is only a tool that should be used by people, to make their lives easier and more fun, and if it does, organizations will be successful in providing long term and sustainable jobs for employees and generating profits for their shareholders. Hopefully, these revenues passed on in a fair way to the employees, and not only skimmed by the shareholder
