It is definitely down, written off by thousands of individual and institutional investors. The most obvious issue: scams. In the world of crypto, big firms are scams. Little firms are scams. Stable coins are scams; exchanges are scams; NFT schemes are scams; initial coin offerings are scams; tokens are scams. Firms run by self-proclaimed altruists are scams. Firms run by the shadiest dudes you can possibly imagine are scams.
I see two different, perhaps even 3 different questions here. The first is the headline: Is crypto dead. The second and perhaps third are: Will it recover to where it was before and sustain as an industry.
The short answer to the first is pretty obvious to me: No. Crypto will settle in a niche, which might just be cross border payments beyond effective monitoring.
For the second: No. The title here in this case is abridged, it conflates the bubble of crypto with cryto itself. It bypasses Bettridges law of headlines by combining two questions in one. Honestly I couldn’t be bothered bypassing the paywall so I didn’t read the whole article. Market activity is correlated to interest, and number of people who haven’t yet been hit by a wave of FOMO, and either went with it or dismissed it. Web3 is failing to catch on, that was the latest gambit, and there hasn’t been any clues that something else is in the pipeline. I partially attribute this to Folding Ideas, who did great breakdowns of both NFTs and The Metaverse. The NFT one was easily his most popular video, and while not so engaging, that someone who very quickly came on the stage as a market force of crypto, releasing yet another video against the entire thing, is big, even if not so watched. So we might actually be looking at the market not just reaching yet more heights.
However, this is where the third question comes in. It’s linked, but not quite the same as will the markets recover. The retail side of things is going to start consolidating, but there’s still institutional momentum behind the scenes that has some momentum. This will continue to build out, because they’re offering the tools. Even if the market shrinks, there is still a place for them, and they’re betting the market doesn’t completely implode, which doesn’t seem that likely. There’s enough true believers and other people treating it still as a viable investment to still allow it to shrink and sustain as a boring investment vehicle. It might even get a few more blips, but it seems like the FOMO news articles getting out into the wider public won’t do their thing anymore. Boring is what I envision the future of crypto to be.
I think a useful exercise is to replace the word “crypto” with “shared ledger.” It’s a mathematically signed list of transactions that the community agreed happened. That’s it. A shared ledger.
So try on a few sentences.
- “I’m using a shared ledger to send money without incurring huge fees.” (Reasonable)
- “I’m using a shared ledger to prove who ‘owns’ my pixel art avatar.” (Stupid)
- “I own a row on a shared ledger because I have a proxy real money and now they’re holding that row for me.” (Hmmmm)
Crypto is a casino, for the most part, and one without the free drinks.
So, it’s a European casino.
While I love the Atlantic, and I’m certainly no booster of crypto, this whole article smells like a lazy hot take. It’s mixing and conflating a lot of things: the technology with the crypto-bro grifters, the transactional features with the “investment” opportunity.
Ultimately crypto – coins, tokens, whatever – it’s all just a shared ledger. That’s it. Does a shared ledger have its uses? Yes.
