When you hear words like “blockchain” do you immediately conjure up images of Minecraft, that video game your 14-year-old son plays all day? Or when you encounter the phrase “metaverse” do you instantly hear Keanu Reeves utter his famous “Woah!” line from The Matrix? Don’t feel bad, you’re not alone. To many, they feel like buzzwords that gamers and tech savants love to throw around on their discussion boards. But in fact, they are foundational pieces of a larger tech shift that we are in the midst of and may not even know it.

The new frontier, being called web3, is ditching a previous internet dominated by companies that provide services in exchange for personal data, and instead wants to “decentralize” ownership to build interaction, community, and return power to the creator. Why should you care? Because there’s a lot of money at play. J.P. Morgan predicts the metaverse will be a $1 trillion market. Undoubtedly much of that will be purely for entertainment. But there will be another part emerging around productivity and expanding the physical realm, which is where design firms come in.

In an effort to make some sense of all this, for this episode of Bevel I joined forces with my friend and fellow podcaster Arnaud Marthouret, creator of the Single Servesseries, and sat down with Tessa Bain and Andrew Lane, co-founders of the Toronto-based firm Digby, to unpack the meaning and interconnectedness of things like NFTs, augmented reality, the metaverse and understand why web3 represents more opportunities than just being an avatar running around in a cartoon universe.