Jonny Fry / James Tylee of Digital Bytes by Team Blockchain on Cyber.FM featuring Timo Lehes, co-founder of Swarm Markets

Welcome to this week's Digital Bytes which is a little later as I was in Amsterdam yesterday and have just arrived back in London. I was presenting at the 2Tokens conference and workshop which was looking at a variety of case studies of how real assets are being offered in digital wrappers and the challenges of regulation and education required for tokenised assets to be further adopted. In this week's edition we have articles on the following topics: NFTs to be treated as legal property - a recent ruling in the High Court of England and Wales states that NFTs are to be treated as ‘property’. So, is this further evidence of NFTs emerging from the shadows and into the mainstream, whereby helping fuel further adoption given that greater legal clarity for this asset class ought to be beneficial for institutions looking to sell or buy NFTs? NFTs: a passing fad or here to stay? - there has been a huge increase in the number of NFTs and the variety of ways in which they are being used. Arguably, we have already passed the point of NFTs simply being a fad since they are seemingly set to enter mainstream adoption thereby offering a way for holding and transferring digital assets and data. Interest in NFTs has potentially been driven by speculation and FOMO, but increasingly we are seeing NFTs being used to solve challenges in business, such as supply chains, or personally for digital identities. Web 3 and tokenisation of everything - as we witness increasing interest in Web 3 and the development of Blockchain technology, there seems to be no limit to what can be tokenised i.e., digitally wrapped and distributed on a global basis. Tokenisation is already impacting our personal lives as well as our working ones and, as we see the growing adoption of the metaverse, we will see the digitisation of both physically tangible, as well as intangible, assets. Will we skip open finance and go straight to DeFi? - open finance brings together data across all those financial services that a consumer might interact with (from mortgages to pensions, insurance to banking) to build a more complete picture of that person's financial footprint. The campaign for its open finance implementation is playing out in EU data policy and industry-led initiatives. Could the innovation of DeFi mean we skip the campaign for open finance altogether and jump straight to DeFi?