Paper & Blocks

What do someone from a large money center bank, a small local credit union, a mid-sized RIA, a fixed-income trading desk, and a payment services provider have in common? Well, it is the same thing everyone in finance has in common: they should be paying attention to crypto. Perhaps it is not at the top of the to-do list, or maybe crypto is still viewed as a novelty or passing fad, but regardless of one’s views [positive or negative] on the space, there is good reason to pay attention: to learn about the future of money and finance.

Learning about the future entails trying to understand what themes, trends and ideas will become more prevalent in the market of tomorrow, and which will not. Today, the crypto colossus represents thousands of different experiments running on an incredibly liquid playing field and there is benefit to examining both the whole and its individual parts. What takeaways are there for the consumer? What takeaways are there for the financial system? What innovations will emerge from the crypto sandbox for the innovators and early adopters?

Below is a summary of my personal thesis on ‘where’ and ‘why’ to pay attention. None of this is new thinking. It has all likely been said somewhere in the past, but what I hope to do is bring it all together into a single consolidated narrative.

The summary also serves as the table of contents for the remainder of this article.        

1. Crypto can be a net positive for the consumer: It creates value through a variety of debatable but growing use cases. Pay attention to the customer pain points crypto solves (said another way, the value it creates).
2. Crypto can be a net positive for the financial system: Building digitally-native financial primitives could mean new infrastructure for today’s analog financial system. Pay attention to the industry pain points crypto solves and the new competitive dynamics it can create.
3. Open systems beat closed systems: The composability, portability and permissionlessness inherent in the crypto ecosystem has produced a relentless pace of change in the industry’s sandbox of experiments. Pay attention to the ideas/innovation/opportunities crypto focuses on.

Preface

Before diving into each area in more detail, there are five fundamental truths about the landscape today that are important to set the stage. Those are:

• Finance is the ultimate facilitator of the economy. Finance is a horizontal industry, spanning across all areas of commerce. It is the circulatory system enabling most forms of economic activity across the world today.
  
• The financial system is the ultimate facilitator of finance. It is how we execute finance today in order to move and record ownership across the economy. So, if we can fundamentally change how ownership is moved and/or recorded, we can unlock new ways to create value through the financial system.

• Crypto changes how we move and record ownership: Prior to 2008, ownership [especially digital ownership] required some form of centralized entity to maintain a ledger and manage and record transactions. With the introduction of the bitcoin whitepaper, the knowledge that enables us to create digital scarcity proliferated. Ownership no longer has to require a middleman and the systems around it can be built with digitally native characteristics (permissionless, borderless, composable and highly liquid).

• Digitally native characteristics for ownership will attract speculation: Permissionlessness means anyone can participate in ownership. Borderlessness eliminates international boundaries making ‘ownership’ markets global. Composability means anyone can remix and create new ‘ownership’ services. Highly liquid means ‘ownership’ markets run efficiently. The result: anyone in the world can transact with anyone else at any time for any price. This unlocks tradability for any on-chain asset which attracts speculation.

• Speculation is a key ingredient for progress: Crypto’s primary use case and value creation mechanism so far has been around speculation (I know it’s not the only one… more on that soon). But speculation is what enables us to finance the early stages of new technologies, or what Carlota Perez terms the “installation phase”.

In short, the emergence of a new way to move/record ownership has the potential to shake up the foundations of the economy and the financial system [not to be overly dramatic…]. It also attracts speculation, but instead of being pointless, that speculation can be seen as a precursor for progress.

The next section aims to layout some of the progress that can potentially be made.

Theory Number 1: Crypto can be a net positive for the user

Looking at crypto use cases from a consumer perspective is a lot like peering at a lighthouse through the ocean fog. We can see the faint outline of something on the horizon, and occasionally it flashes us with some brilliant light, but often the speculative haze becomes too thick for us to clearly see what might be beyond.

The thing to pay attention here though are the problems crypto has a realistic chance to solve for the consumer. What are some of crypto’s primary jobs-to-be-done? This is a long and growing list that I’ll only scratch the surface on below with some general categories:

Self-sovereignty:

Be your own bank. This has varying degrees of appeal for consumers and also currently carries some risk. But, as an ode to crypto’s libertarian roots, this has to be stated as the original job-to-be-done. The manner in which public-key cryptography was elegantly embedded in the bitcoin whitepaper along with an automated monetary system complete with integrated clearing and settlement set the stage for digital scarcity and permissionless participation. Not only can you custody your own assets (a benefit of physical cash), you are also able to interact with the financial system in myriad of ways (a benefit of a bank). This is cash on steroids, yet it retains physical money’s original property: the self-sovereignty of a bearer instrument.

Money movement:

The properties of most crypto assets make them unique as a money movement system. Need to pay for a coffee, yes you can do that thanks to crypto payment gateways. Need to move money across borders, check out crypto remittance networks. Need to move money in real time, check out payment streaming. Need to move large sums of value very quickly, try any blockchain (the largest transaction to date was $1.1 billion at a cost of $0.68 on the bitcoin blockchain in April 2020). Need to make a lot of really small transactions, try using crypto for micropayments. Want to code complex instructions into your transaction, good thing most cryptoassets are programmable money.  Should I go on? Crypto may not be the fastest settlement rail, nor have the most protections or security (irreversibility seems like a great feature until you send your bitcoin to the wrong address), but it has one characteristic that shines: its versatility. Handling all the use cases above and more, permissionless versatility means crypto has and will insert itself into payments use cases that were not possible before. It is an innovation engine for money movement, a banner that often gets overlooked at the hands of more in-your-face applications.

Inflation Hedge Speculation:

Let’s start this section with the idea of sound money, which was slapped as a label on bitcoin as it emerged from the depths of the Cypherpunk world. With a finite supply and declining rate of inflation, bitcoin (and several other cryptoassets) were pointed to as the ultimate inflation hedge. A sharp contrast from the aggressive post-COVID monetary easing emanating from most of the world’s central banks, the digital gold meme proliferated far and wide, flaunting bitcoin as a protection mechanism. Unfortunately, when an asset becomes a meme, reflexivity kicks in and risk-seeking capital attempts to rush in before the meme finishes propagating. So, despite the core fundamentals of bitcoin’s supply schedule creating theoretical soundness, speculating on the very nature of the ‘inflation hedging’ asset can create massive volatility, which is how the story has played out to date. As more stable pools of capital (and hodlers) become a larger part of the crypto ecosystem, the extreme volatility may fade and the inflation hedging dream may eventually be realized. Until then, playing the risk-reward game on this thesis, and many others, will continue to draw fast money into crypto, shining a light on its primary use case to date: speculation.

Having fun:

a16z’s Chris Dixon likes to say what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years. As such, it should come as no surprise that the gaming industry can be used as a robust leading indicator of up-and-coming technologies. People play around with new technologies before they become legitimate businesses, and crypto is no different. This ‘fun’ or ‘engagement’ could be driven by speculation, but it can also be driven by the new design space crypto opens up for entertainment venues like the gaming industry thanks to portability and interoperability of digital assets. In-game economies, play-and-earn structures, and portable skins/items are a few of the ways crypto is embedding itself in gaming architecture. Hobbyists from investors to gamers to collectors are deriving some form of entertainment out of the crypto-sphere, which fulfills another core job-to-be-done.

Creating and governing communities (DAOs):

Large scale co-operation is what separated homo sapiens from other evolutionary competition thousands of years ago. The ability to work toward a common interest by holding a shared story or myth was what drove progress forward. People organized themselves around families, tribes, religions and cities. More recently, the corporation has become the dominant form of economic co-operation, but it is one that has some limitations. Corporate structures have existed for hundreds of years, evolving over the 18^th and 19^th centuries into the limited liability giants that they are today. Anchored in their paper-based roots, not only are they administratively challenging to set-up, but they also lack any easy mechanism to create distributed ownership and governance.  DAOs, or Decentralized autonomous organizations, solve both of these problems. Built on the chassis of a smart contract, DAOs provide a new low-friction way for people to organize themselves around a common economic cause. That could be as simple and as short-lived as trying to bid for a priceless U.S. artifact or as complicated and long-term as managing a billion dollar DeFi protocol like Maker. By lowering the barriers to economic co-operation, DAOs are creating new forms of value for their constituents, despite their current murky legal status.

Ownership/provenance of digital goods (collectibles):

A quick glance at Wikipedia tells us that the hobby of collecting includes seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining items that are of interest to an individual collector. Collecting was typically reserved for physical assets like coins, cars or stamps because both scarcity and provenance was easy to confirm. The creation of ‘digital scarcity’ has enabled a new format for collectors. Now digital goods (via non-fungible tokens or NFTs) can also be imbued with the same characteristics as their physical counterparts. Not only that, digital goods also benefit from a higher degree of tradability and liquidity, making collecting a more seamless process. NFTs have birthed a cottage industry within the crypto community, where people are actively collecting art, PFPs, digital trading cards, virtual real estate, and so on.

Social signaling and community affiliation:

In 2023, Bernard Arnault, founder of luxury powerhouse LVMH became the richest man in the world with a net worth of $211 billion. His empire of luxury goods was built, in-part, on the premise that people are willing to pay a premium for certain products that signal to the world something about them. Namely, that they are wealthy and have ‘status’. But people do more than just signal their desired perceived traits through their economic activity. They may also signal things like who they aspire to be (a child wearing their favorite player’s baseball jersey) or what communities or groups they are affiliated with (driving a Prius or bearing a cross on a necklace). As is also the case with collectibles, thanks to the unique one-of-ones that can now be created online, digital goods have also become signaling items. People can purchase an NBA Top Shot NFT to rep their favorite team or support their favorite player; they can acquire a creator NFT to show their appreciation for their art; or they can even trade for a PFP to gain access to a new community of people brought together by their shared interest in a project. Even a wallet full of fungible Dogecoin says something about you that you might (or might not) want to flaunt. Social signaling is now a core use case for crypto and it will continue to grow as big brands like LVMH who make their living off of signaling in the real world realize there is opportunity to do so in the digital realm as well. “The institutions are here, just not the ones we expected”.

Digital identity:

A step beyond the social signaling power of digital goods is the broader proof of identity they can provide. This can be proof for simple things like proof-of-collateral when taking out a loan; or proof of attendance of an event (like POAPs provide); or proof of belonging using things like token gating to create exclusivity; or proof of competence through things like on-chain verifiable credentials; or… you get the picture. Playing this out further into the future becomes interesting. We spend an increasing amount of our time in the digital world, but our identities are still anchored to the physical world. However, once there’s demand to live life online because that’s where most of your verifiable identity lives, that could produce a tipping point for our identities to become anchored in the digital world, on-chain. But for now, crypto is providing new forms of value by allowing individuals to attach things to their identities, from goods to experiences to community affiliations.

Network building:

Oh right, crypto can also be a fundraising mechanism… Of course, that activity needs to stay within the confines of securities law, which a number of individuals learned the hard way after 2017’s ICO boom. Aside from ‘getting rich quick’ through sketchy means, tokens have carved out their own category as a unique type of asset, one that isn’t quite equity and isn’t quite a collectible, but somewhere in between. Tokens can be infused with utility by designing them to perform a specific action within the blockchain of a given project. Some of that utility is attached to features that are very ‘equity-like’, like voting rights or capital raising, but others are more digitally-native and unique. Helium’s token, HNT, for example, is used to incentivize and facilitate the operation of its wireless infrastructure, encouraging people to set-up hotspots to collectively build out wireless coverage that can rival Verizon or AT&T. That type of bootstrapping and utility would only be possible through an asset class that has the diverse programmable characteristics that digital assets can offer.

Negative and unethical use cases:

The operative word in the statement: “crypto is a net positive for the user” is ‘net’. Technology can be used for both good and evil and digital assets are no different. Some of the top negative use cases include: fraud (a financial system without adequate regulatory oversight offers a large playground for fraudsters and scammers); hacks (self-sovereignty and the storage of a new type of asset makes custodians and portals a honeypot for hackers looking for a quick win); scams (from pump-and-dumps to Ponzi schemes and everything in between); speculation (belongs in this category as well since speculative activity creates both winners and losers); etc. Bad actors cannot be prevented, but they can certainly be contained and it will be up to ecosystem participants, regulators and lawmakers to ensure that these negative use cases remain a sidenote in what is otherwise a value creation story.

The categories above capture some of the broad consumer-facing use cases present in crypto today. Each of them deserves a long post on their own. There are so many rabbit holes to go down and so many different projects to highlight. For further reading, I’d recommend starting with this Bitwise whitepaper: Crypto Use Cases: 12 Real-World Stories of How Millions of People Are Using Crypto Services Today—like most of their content, it does not disappoint.

By studying these categories, it becomes clear that despite the speculative lean present in crypto today, the technology fundamentally changes how we move and record ownership, and as a result, creates value for consumers in a variety of ways that are still being uncovered.

But that is not where the story ends… While the front-facing applications are exciting, so to is the potential to build better financial infrastructure behind the scenes.

Theory Number 2: Crypto can be a net positive for the financial system

On its surface, the modern-day financial system appears to have adapted well to the digital age. Most people primarily bank online, they can simply ‘tap’ their cards to make payments, cheques have become a thing of the past, and retail investors are able to buy a fraction of a stock of their favorite company, even after markets have closed. Fintech has done wonders for creating a more usable, accessible, and democratized system for consumers across the world.

But there is diminishing marginal returns to fintech’s forward progress. Take equity markets for example. Trading moved from professionals exchanging paper in ‘the pits’ to electronic trading systems with real-time quotes to the online and mobile trading retail investors know today. Although the user experience has significantly improved, today’s market structure still sits on top of the same systems as the paper-based traders used back-in-the-day. Trades still settle T+2 and most trading venues continue to only be open on weekdays between 9:30am-4:00pm.

As pointed out by Simon Taylor here, traditional finance (TradFi) isn’t digital, but rather digitized (ie. it is analog processes replicated in digital form). It also isn’t global, but rather globalized (ie. it is a connected patchwork of national systems). Financial technology has not been created from first principles for a long time, which is why one of the next major frontiers for crypto to tackle is the aging financial infrastructure problem.

Building digitally-native financial primitives could mean new infrastructure for old systems with crypto and traditional finance (TradFi) eventually converging by putting traditional systems on to new digitally-native rails.

Applications and assets

An abstraction of this idea is that financial systems simply consist of applications and assets (banks and deposits; lenders and loans; asset managers and investments; etc.). Crypto recreates both in ways that drive enormous improvements over what exists today.

Applications: DeFi is constructing globally accessible financial primitives (applications) for things like borrowing, lending, trading, investing, and hedging risk. These applications are always competing (subject to the whims of forked code and vampire attacks); always improving (iterating based on user feedback like other technology products) and are subject to the benefits of both network economies and winner-take-all effects. After all, if one decentralized exchange (DEX) manages to attract the most liquidity in the market, more and more activity will gravitate toward it creating a ‘one-primitive to rule them all’ dynamic. This highly competitive environment is pushing the DeFi world to create incredibly valuable and globally accessible financial infrastructure—some taking the form of hyperstructures, a topic for another day.

Assets: The substrate that flows through these applications are on-chain financial assets. Once on-chain, these assets are imbued with the characteristics of programmability, composability, security and transparency. They offer endless opportunities for innovation.

The hypercompetitive DeFi arena is driving continuous improvement in its menu of automated applications (moving, borrowing, lending, rehypothecating, managing, speculating, managing risk, etc.) and any real world asset brought on chain is able to benefit from these infrastructural improvements. More specifically, bringing assets on-chain solves a variety of existing challenges that plague today’s financial system.

The problems crypto infrastructure solves

Let’s use the old Jeff Bezos trick: what’s not going to change over the next decade? Much like the retail consumer, financial consumers and industry participants are going to want low prices, fast delivery, and vast selection. Crypto has the potential to bring all three to financial markets.

1) Cost (lower prices):

DeFi is the ultimate disintermediator of financial labor and its ability to ‘automate financial labor’ and remove layers from the system means lower cost financial functions. For example, the entire maturity transformation function of a bank can be bundled up and offered in an automated fashion through lending protocols like Aave. Decentralized systems, through automation, improve upon existing centralized models. Even staying within the crypto realm, Coinbase (a centralized business model) employs more than 5,000 people while Uniswap (an exchange with a decentralized model) counts fewer than 100. Consequently, Uniswap generates $14.9m per employee, compared to Coinbase at $1.38m, a 10x difference in efficiency! Disintermediation and automation is the name of the cost-saving game.

2) Efficiency (fast delivery):

Outside of automation, crypto rails tend to have faster transaction processing and settlement times, offering a higher degree of efficiency and finality than traditional rails. This is particularly true for any financial systems that rely on batch processing for settlement (which includes everything from equity market transactions to international remittances). Putting transactions on blockchain rails tends to see a step-change improvement, which varies by protocol and ecosystem. It should be noted, although transaction processing times are incredibly fast, improving the system’s throughput (ie. scalability) is a challenge that the crypto ecosystem is having to tackle as a whole.

3) Programmability (vast selection):

This is where DeFi gets interesting. Not only can it do things the old system does, only faster, but it can also open up new avenues for innovation. Take atomic settlement, for example, which breaks a complex transaction into its atomic components and settles them all simultaneously. Atomic swaps offer a method for two parties to ‘swap assets’ (eg. stablecoins for bitcoin) without the need for an intermediary or trusted third party. Instead, the intermediary oversight is replaced by a smart contract that ensures that either the entire transaction is completed, or if one party defaults, it is canceled entirely. Also inherent in the programmability trait are the ideas of composability and interoperability. This allows on-chain services to combined seamlessly to create something new for the end user.

Use cases are being established

Just as it is challenging to replace a car’s engine while it is moving, it is equally difficult to rip out decades old financial plumbing while the financial services industry continues to operate. Experimentation is required to sort out which traditional financial activities are improved when they are put on chain and which are not. That experimental activity is starting to ramp up through both avenues of assets and applications:

Tokenization—Bringing Assets On-chain:

If DeFi is going to impact the custody and movement of traditional financial assets, they will first require the creation of digital representations, or tokens, of real-world assets (RWAs) to bring them on chain. Fiat-collateralized stablecoins (like USDC and USDT) are perhaps the best example of this with over $115 billion of tokenized currencies (mostly US Dollars) circulating today. However, there are also projects to tokenize all types of existing financial assets: stocks, funds, treasuries, alternative assets, real estate, etc. According to Ben Forman at ParaFi there are 150-200 different teams building in this space and 500-1,000 pilot projects planned in the years ahead. And according to Galaxy Research, excluding stablecoins, this activity has produced $3.1 billion of RWAs on-chain today, a figure the research house projects to triple by 2024 and exceed $10 billion. Of course, this is a drop in the bucket when contrasted to the opportunity, but today’s current state is more about establishing proof points and showcasing that the systems can indeed work and can deliver the promised benefits.

DeFi – Automating Capital Market Functions Through Applications:

Automated market making (DEXs), automated underwriting (lending protocols), automated derivatives (synthetic asset creation), automated securitization (tokenization) and automated investment strategies (asset management protocols) are some of the early examples of successfully constructing a traditional capital markets function in code through a smart contract-based application. There are also crypto-native capital market functions that have arisen to drive liquidity to projects. These range from buy-side functions like yield farming and liquidity mining to the sell-side functions like token issuance that enable those activities. The movement of assets is a function that deserves special attention since crypto rails open up many new possibilities that did not exist before: programmable dollars with automatic execution; streaming payments (which solves the ‘float’ problem that exist in batch-based settlement); micropayments (pay per use, per read, per mile, machine to machine payments, etc.); and simple improvements over today’s popular payment mechanisms like cash and international remittances.

As the applications improve and more assets gravitate on-chain, we get closer to realizing the potential crypto has to impact and improve more traditional asset classes. However, this will not be a smooth transition. Crypto rails and the firms that build upon them will have to engage in some creative problem solving in the years ahead since most protocols were developed for public use and may not meet the safeguard and security standards that have been developed over decades in the finance industry. The gap, however, is not unbridgeable. One read of this paper by JP Morgan, DBS, and OliverWyman showcases how today’s financial services leaders are taking the opportunity seriously. Speaking of big names, let’s end this section with a quote from BlackRock CEO and prior crypto-skeptic Larry Fink: “the next generation for markets, the next generation for securities, will be tokenization of securities.”

Theory Number 3: Open systems beat closed systems

Deciding when a technology is ripe for entrepreneurial development is not too different from a venture capitalist deciding a technology is ripe for investment… For me, the most important telltale factor is the development of a simple and elegant user interface—a gateway of effortless interaction that plucks a technology from the hands of the geeks and deposits it with the entrepreneurs. In fact, it was exactly this kind of interface that transformed the Internet.

–Peter Diamandis, BOLD

Today, as we sit nearly three years removed from the peak of the crypto hype cycle in 2021, although prices are currently depressed, that speculative mania provided the fuel for many of the builders in the space to keep on building over the past several years.

The core enabling characteristics of the crypto ecosystem that are so powerful in its continued progress are its transparency and decentralization. Most protocols are de facto open-source technology, meaning anyone can look under the hood and either use, build upon or fork the existing code base. Not only that, the composable nature of blockchain-based applications is the ‘interface’ that is needed to create a playground for entrepreneurs. The internet flourished because its openness and global accessibility allowed builders to compound their efforts, adding content, then networks, then applications, then storage/compute, all online. Crypto will benefit from the same tailwind, which is the idea that open ecosystems tend to out-innovate closed ecosystems over time.

The core ingredients of this theory are:

1) When the design space is massive, open architecture thrives:

The larger the design space, the more diverse the needs of its constituents. Information is a massive design space that best suited the internet’s open architecture instead of a closed private network like AOL. Mobile applications are a massive design space that best suited an open Apple App Store instead of one where all apps were built in-house. Similarly, money and finance is a massive design space that is perhaps best suited to a more open architecture than today’s walled gardens.

2) Incentives are everything, and ownership is one of the most powerful incentive mechanisms around:

Meeting a diverse set of needs requires builders who are motivated to build. Open-source projects have historically relied on community contribution, personal fulfillment and indirect business opportunities to power their people. With the emergence of the ‘ownership economy’, however, the ability to attract, engage and retain qualified contributors has likely never been stronger than it is in crypto.

3) A robust interface for developers = High rep experimentation:

Easy to use interfaces like TikTok’s video editor or Squarespace’s website builder place tools into the hands of millions of people and lower the friction to ‘create’. Both ingredients produce high repetition production and experimentation by ‘creators’, thereby enabling these platforms to serve the needs of a wide variety of audiences. Similarly, an openly available code base, low/no code tooling, and a library of token designs have placed financial architecture tools into the hands of millions of potential builders, allowing crypto to experiment its way into meeting an incredibly wide set of use cases.

4) Composability and compoundability:

Crypto can be thought of as the compound interest of software due to three key characteristics: improvement proposals, forks and vampire attacks. Improvement proposals, like BIPs for Bitcoin and EIPs for Ethereum, are what allow protocols to evolve and grow with the times in a community-led manner. Forks allow anyone to start a new chain based on the old one (complete with all the history and features) if there are fundamental disagreements about the path forward. Vampire attacks allow anyone who thinks they have created a better mousetrap, not only to move forward with forked code, but also to incentivize an existing audience to join in with their vision of the future. These three features keep the crypto ecosystem moving forward, building on top of itself and compounding as it goes. Not only that, crypto is composable. Money legos carry with them the ability to mix and match, so two protocols can be used in concert to create something wholly new for the user.

A sandbox for financial innovation

The relentless pace of the industry’s sandbox of experiments offer some validation of the above ideas. From L2 zero knowledge roll-ups, to property rights in the metaverse to the ReFi movement to tilt finance in the direction of sustainability, the pace of the crypto innovation train only accelerates fueled by things unfamiliar to traditional finance like the system’s openness and accessibility. 

This is THE core reason for finance people to pay attention to crypto: it is the best sandbox for financial innovation that has ever existed. Never before have so many experiments been run about ‘what an alternative financial system could look like’ and ‘what unconstrained form factors assets can take’. The DeFi realm is now effectively a parallel financial system, complete with multiple shades of today’s common financial services. All of these can be viewed as an ongoing set of experiments to see what works and what doesn’t as crypto automates different forms of financial labor. However, it is up to the traditional finance world whether or not these learnings get digested and embraced.

Looking Ahead

After spilling a lot of ink, there is a clear case that crypto can be a net positive for the consumer, it can be a net positive for the financial system, and it is an open architecture system, which carries certain advantages over the competing closed systems we have today.

Right now, most of this progress is hypothetical. Although real world value has been created, eventually crypto will have to ‘show us the money’ and deliver the widespread benefits so many of its ardent supporters have touted.

It is likely that more hints of this start to appear through the next four-year cycle where Web3 may be the driving force for broader public comfort and adoption.

Regardless of the driver, the directional arrow of progress appears to point toward more engagement, not less.

Although recent events have perhaps tainted public opinion on the industry, it is tough to ignore the innovation and proof points that can be observed in the market.

While sentiment will ebb-and-flow over time, it is the responsibility of the financial services industry to ensure that it maximizes its value to the economy and the population that it exists to serve.

After all, if open beats closed, then the path to betterment might just happen to run through crypto. If that’s the case, well, I guess that’s the path we’ll have to pursue… or at the very least, pay close attention to.