Burnt Banksy, the founder of XION blockchain, gained international attention in 2021 for burning a $90,000 Banksy art piece after tokenising it, in a bid to prove that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) must be valuable in themselves. Most thought of it as just a stunt, but the NFT of the painting went to sell for around $400,000. 

Fast forward three years, Burnt Banksy “hasn’t lit anything on fire for quite some time.”

“But since then, we raised $36 million for a protocol called XION to completely make crypto disappear,” he said. 

The XION blockchain aims to democratise Web3 use by making blockchain technology easy to use for ordinary people through user-friendly interfaces and familiar log-in methods. The blockchain allows developers to build, launch and scale consumer-ready Web3 products. 

“We believe that one of the aspects of what we work on in crypto is making everything borderless. That’s a very big aspect because one of the hardest things in the world to get is an American bank account,” he said. 

Burnt Banksy noted that because of the inherently difficult on-off ramping technologies and restrictions, NFTs did not evolve into a broad-based market but is evolving into many bespoke markets. 

He also said the ambitions of traditional financial institutions to ace the digital asset markets will be limited because they will not be able to keep up with the speed with which this technology is evolving. Also, the future of digital assets will not be solely in finance. 

“The speed of this industry will inevitably be the reason why the big guys won’t win,” he said.