This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Scott Allison Si
Crypto Convergence
I check crypto prices on an almost hourly basis, and crypto Twitter posts during the moments in between. Whenever I jog or wash the dishes, I listen to crypto podcasts. Whenever I’m in front of the computer, I click on the crypto Youtube videos in my recommendations list or fire up the crypto trading portal.
I don’t think I’m the only one.
One encounter that surprised me was a client meeting I attended last week. While we were presenting our investment management solution, the client cut us short and asked whether we had solutions around crypto. He was keen to hear an asset manager’s views on crypto allocations in investment portfolios. Everyone else in the room was dumbfounded. I suppressed a smile.
My professional and personal life, present, past, and future are all converging.
My journey in crypto started when I received a message from an old university friend, asking me whether I would be interested to join a Bitcoin exchange startup in the Philippines which had the vision to use digital currencies to disrupt remittances. To be honest, what sparked my interest at that time was not the crypto part, but the chance to join a team of visionaries with Silicon Valley pedigree.
That was late 2014. Bitcoin had just crashed 80% amid the Mount Gox aftermath. For the few who knew about bitcoin, they linked it with scams or illegal transactions. The narrative then was ‘Blockchain, not Bitcoin’. My first mandate as the marketing lead of a Bitcoin startup was to scrub every mention of ‘Bitcoin’ from all our customer communications and focus instead on payment use cases.
Coming from that angle, I was skeptical about holding any cryptocurrency. Like most people, I saw it simply as better payment rails. I read tons of articles on the subject and summarized what I learned in this article — framing email as a metaphor for Bitcoin. Even when I described my work to friends and family, I was careful to use words like ‘digital wallet’ or ‘fintech’ rather than ‘crypto’ or ‘Bitcoin.’ Time passed. I moved on to new opportunities.
Then, 2017 happened.
The rise of Ethereum. The ICO boom. The wild tear of Bitcoin from $900 to $20,000 in the span of months. Big money has a way of capturing the world’s attention. Suddenly, crypto was in the spotlight. There was so much excitement around the space. I was kicking myself for not paying more attention earlier. I was there at the forefront of this revolution. It was there for the taking! If only.
The 2018 crash followed. While people were calling crypto dead, I knew something had fundamentally changed. Some of the smartest people in the tech industry were betting their entire lives on this thing. I knew I should keep paying attention.
Fast forward to 2020.
The narrative around Bitcoin had shifted completely. Nobody spoke about bitcoin as payment rails anymore — it had become a store of value, an inflation hedge, digital gold. Amid the excessive money printing, institutions have started pouring money in. It’s breathtaking to see Bitcoin do a 180-degree turn from criminals’ currency to a pension-grade investment asset.
Even Bitcoin has become a sideshow in the last couple of months, giving way to the new media darling — NFTs. These non-fungible tokens represent unique ownership of art, media, and collectibles on the blockchain. On a technical level, it’s exciting because digital files that were supposed to be infinitely replicable can now be scarce. On a cultural level, it’s exciting because artists and creators have a new way to monetize fan love directly. With media and culture as fuel for this virtuous cycle, NFTs have taken the world by storm. All of this is powered by Ethereum, a decentralized world computer that is ushering the next wave of the internet.
Through this arc, you could trace the evolution of the crypto narrative from advanced payment rails, to digital gold, and now the foundation for the Web 3.0 era of the internet. Bitcoin market cap has breached $1T. Overall crypto market cap is now approaching $2T. The volume on a crypto exchange like Binance regularly hits $30B per day. Jpeg files are selling for millions of dollars. Ethereum killers are springing up left and right. New crypto networks are springing up every day that are ‘decentralizing’ finance. Tesla, Square, Paypal, and Visa are all legitimizing crypto for the everyday consumer.
We are well past the time when we can dismiss crypto as tulip mania or speculative fad. Crypto is shaping up to be one of the most important revolutions of our time. I know I will have to keep paying attention to this space — the more I understand crypto, the better equipped I can be for this new world. Not many understand it yet, but the genie is now out of the bottle. There’s no turning back.
Crypto and Convergence was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Scott Allison Si
Scott Allison Si | Sciencx (2021-04-05T13:10:13+00:00) Crypto and Convergence. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2021/04/05/crypto-and-convergence/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.