It’s okay to opt out of the crypto revolution

Bigger players haven't figured out peer-to-peer. Since early 2021, the two companies have claimed to support the digital currency. Though the platforms allow US customers to buy, sell, or trade, they can't pay for purchases or send coins to other users. If the future of money is here, there isn't much regular people can do with money in the future.

Despite the fact that it's difficult to spend it, it's still easy to lose it, and as the industry grows, so do the losses. More than 14 billion dollars were lost to fraudsters last year, mostly individuals like the targets of all those ads, without the protections set up in traditional financial systems. The losses keep increasing. Sky Mavis reported in late March that a hacker had stolen $625 million from the blockchain behind the pay-to-play game AxieInfinity.

Even if their wallet is not hacked, individuals face risk from the extreme volatility of the markets; in the past six months, the value of Bitcoin dropped more than 20% in a single day.

I worry about access and misuse, says the author of The Tech That Comes Next. Can they use it? What does sustainable living look like? How is it empowering the communities we are building for? I don't know if those questions have been answered.

The relationship between the community and the industry seems to be predatory. A small group of predictable players are getting rich off the risks taken by regular people. It is not a flattering stat to say that as of December 2021, only 1% of the currency was held by people in the US, which is a far more skewed ratio than in the US. Cryptocurrencies increase in value as demand increases because they are not backed by a real asset. When more people buy in, VCs and executives watch their portfolios to see if they go up or down. Marketing in tech can help raise awareness of a new technology or build a user base before monetization. There are two things happening incryptocurrencies. Marketing can pay the industry's bills if it persuades enough people to convert their money to coins.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old CEO of FTX, is worth an estimated $24 billion, and he started his career in traditional finance. Bankman-Fried is the richest American in the digital currency, but there are six other billionaires on Forbes' list of the richest Americans. At the end of the year, Changpeng Zhao was worth $96 billion, but by the beginning of April he was worth $63 billion. David Golum says capitalism is happy to sell a real product and make a small profit on it. As more and more individuals buy into the vision the ads are painting, the wealth of those crypto billionaires continues to grow.

“Never underestimate the power of a lot of money and scam verbiage to persuade a lot of people to do something.”

David Golumbia

The future of consumercryptocurrencies will be shaped by what happens next in regulation. Last year, Facebook shut down Diem after serious regulatory scrutiny. It will probably be the last. The US Department of Justice established a task force in October of 2016 to look into how the markets for cryptocurrencies were facilitating illegal activities. In March, President Biden signed an executive order directing financial agencies to create a full regulatory strategy for digital currency, called aCBDC. Similar levels of efficiency could be offered by these. Private stable coins are pegged to a real asset like the dollar, which is why many exchanges try to limit volatility. The government might outlaw the coins if the US creates aCBDC. FTX CEO Bankman-Fried predicts that the US Federal Reserve's decisions will be the biggest drivers of the market in the coming months.

Traditional banking has seen the limitations of regulation. Even with serious restrictions, the industry may find a way to flourish because of the amount of money pouring into it. We are all likely to feel the effects of this tumultuous moment for a long time to come, but Web3 startups may still be figuring out how to make it useful to regular people.

Selman design.

The non consumer landscape presents a very different picture than the consumer one. Corporate banking services, pharmaceutical giants, film development companies, and international shipping firms are just some of the businesses that are using the internet of things. Efforts could bring old, slow, and sometimes paper-based processes into the digital age and even help industries meet new regulatory requirements.

One example is a company with more than 500 employees. Like a much larger version of Paymobil's money-transfer service, Ripple uses its own token as a bridge between currencies, allowing hundreds of corporate customers, including Bank of America, to use it.

The speed of digital currency is being used to improve legacy banking processes, not replace them. In line with this reform-not-replace attitude, Monica Long sees regulation and even CBDCs as a part of the evolution of the ledger for businesses and finance operations over the next few years.

To support MIT Technology Review's journalism, please consider becoming a subscriber.

The MediLedger Network and its custodian organization, Chronicled, might be the most industry-transforming use case so far. The Drug Supply Chain Security Act was passed by the US government in order to prevent counterfeiting. The act demanded a new way of doing business because health care and the life sciences are notorious for ancient, non-Interoperable systems. The CEO of Chronicled wondered if a private, permissioned system like the one used in the private sector could offer a secure environment in which pharma players could work together. Chronicled launched the MediLedger Network, a group of major pharma companies, in 2019. Chronicled has a range of services for them, like a spoof-proof index of verified product IDs and access to real-time public pricing updates. These narrow solutions are critical within pharma, and they are hard to get there.

Drug safety and faster money transfers for regular people could be achieved with the use of theBlockchain by both MediLedger and Ripple. Do you think about consumercryptocurrencies? If the industry's pitch for a financial revolution sounds too good to be true, that's because it is. We should stick with cash and traditional banking systems until it can offer affordable, everyday uses for new coins and more protections against fraud and scam.

Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist based in San Francisco.