Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 623

I was just reading about London's plans to pedestrianize Oxford Circus with two new semi-circular pedestrian piazzas (pictured above). And it reminded of two things.

One, there are silver linings to this pandemic. And one of them is that it has forced us to rethink how we allocate public space and how we engage with it. It is incredible seeing Toronto right now with so many outdoor patios in full swing. Why eat inside when you can eat outside? We should have been doing this all along.

Two, the transformation of Toronto's Yonge Street cannot happen fast enough. We are sorely missing a pedestrianized spine through the middle of our downtown. This portion of Yonge Street currently looks like shit and I know that we can do much better.

Think La Rambla in Barcelona. Grafton Street in Dublin. Lincoln Road in Miami Beach . These are the streets that seem to always draw you in. They are places where public life can play out. I'm pretty sure that I have never once visited any of these cities and not walked these streets.

Thankfully Yonge Street's transformation is underway . So let's make it truly remarkable and one of the most beautiful streets in the world. That should be the bar we set for ourselves.

Image: Westminster City Council

I setup a new cryptocurrency wallet (offline hardware storage) this evening and then used it to buy brandondonnelly.eth using ENS ( Ethereum Name Service ). I don't know what the hell I'm going to use it for, yet, but I own brandondonnelly.com. So I figured I should grab the decentralized blockchain version of my name as well. Perhaps at some point in the future I'll be glad I did.

I plan to buy a bunch of other .eth domains in the near future as well. The costs are similar to registering a traditional domain.

Part of the reason why I'm doing all of this because I've decided that it's time to do a deep dive and better understand the possibilities of the blockchain (a decentralized vs. centralized internet). I've been following for a number of years, but it has been pretty surface level. It's time to get serious. And I must say that it felt pretty cool to use my new hardware wallet to buy something with ETH.

Overall, things started to really click for me when I saw the digital economy that was emerging with Ethereum (applications, NFTs, DeFi, etc.). Instead of just digital money, I could now see clear use cases and demand drivers for the cryptocurrency. Again, I used ETH to buy brandondonnelly.eth, which means I first had to be an owner of ETH.

If you're looking to better understand the possibilities of a decentralized internet -- specifically why non fungible tokens are bad ass -- check out this blog post by Albert Wenger . He uses the example of the Mona Lisa sitting in the Louvre to explain why NFTs are not a fad and, instead, a "fundamental and profound innovation."

https://youtu.be/ffyHxP6hb3I

Luminar Technologies, which is an autonomous vehicle technology company that I have written about before , just hosted its first ever "Studio Day" in New York City this week. And at the event they announced two new technologies.

The first is called Iris, which is a small lidar device that is intended to be integrated into regular consumer production vehicles -- on the roof just above the windshield. And supposedly the company is on track to have these into full production and available to their OEM partners by the end of next year (2022).

The second technology is something that they are calling Blade, which is a lidar system that can offer a 360 degree field of vision and is intended for use in robo-taxis, trucks, and other consumer vehicles. It's called Blade because it's kind of like a blade that wraps around the tops of these vehicles.

We've been talking about autonomous vehicles for what seems like a long time. And it is now clear that this is not an easy problem to solve. But from what I have read, lidar seems like the promising technology and something that will become necessary for full autonomy. So I am now long $LAZR. Whether this is the right move is still to be determined.

The full Studio Day video is embedded at the top of this post. If you're reading via email subscription and can't see it, click here .

I liked the bit (just after the 9 minute mark) about how headlights were first introduced and how it took some time before they were fully absorbed and integrated into the design of cars. Today they are now a signature design element for most car brands. It's a clever parallel for what Luminar is trying to do with Iris and Blade.