Is crypto really dead?
Whenever possible, I try to read the newspaper. I speak about the one made out of paper. Today, I saw an article in such a newspaper writing how the blockchain bubble has burst. It listed a certain number of projects of larger swiss companies in the crypto world that all failed. Then of course they spoke about the price decline of BTC, about the failures of Luna and FTX. Summing up that the crypto boom is over.
Technologies take time to find their market
What they mentioned in this article is not wrong and a lot of things that have been started didn't work out as planned. But I don't believe that this means that crypto is dead.
When I look back to another technological advance that can be comparable: the internet. In the 1990's a lot of projects evolved around the internet. This new technology was so promising and the stocks of all the companies that were active in this field exploded. What followed was the dot com bubble that burst. Most of the companies disappeared and a lot of money was lost. This however didn't mean that the internet as a technology was dead. Today, the internet dominates our lives. The technology simply needed time to find it's markets and not everything that was related to it was actually useful.
I believe that it's not different for the blockchain technology.
In most cases, the projects that wanted to use blockchain technology had nothing to gain from it
When I look at all the projects that were mentioned in the article that I read, most of these projects have actually nothing to gain from being linked to blockchain. Why would a company create a blockchain for their services? Then Luna and FTX have not much to do with the technology. What happened with them is not much different from Bernie Madoff and consort. The issue is not the technology it's more about packing a scam in a fancy package.
Where is there a market for blockchain
I have been using the blockchain for many years now and I believe I can point out where it's really useful:
Mictrotransactions between people and businesses
The blockchain allows people to send value to each other in a very short time frame around the globe for little or no cost. This is so much better than what we have with the fiat system.
Money storage for the unbanked
Crypto is perfect for people living in conditions where they don't have access to the banking system or where the banking system is not trustworthy. Thanks to crypto people in Venezuela can store value in a high inflationary environment. People around the globe can pay for online services even without bank account or credit cards.
Earning money online
I don't speak about investing but earning money online. There are plenty of ways to earn money with crypto. You can earn for creating content, for staking tokens, for playing games. It's a real alternative from real jobs in many countries.
Rewarding and incentives
Crypto allow the reward and give incentives for actions online. You can give people value for hosting data. You can reward them for creating content, for promoting stuff.
Owning assets in games
In my opinion blockchain games like Splinterlands are one of the biggest revelations of use cases for crypto. It's so amazing to actually own your assets in the game, to exchange them, rent them out or sell them. I see how much kids nowadays spend on google play for game assets that will never be theirs. Crypto offers a real alternative here.
Tokenisation
There are so many ways to tokenize an asset or income source. People can pool together to purchase something and get tokens in return. They can buy tokenized items and get dividends. It's all so simple and easy.
Decentralized finance
Even though this sector has seen a lot of excesses, it's still great to use liquidity pools and swap tokens. Liquidity pools are an invention by themselves and they can bring a lot of value for tokens that have not too much liquidity.
I would also put all kind of delegations into decentralized finance. It's perfect to be able to rent out your assets without loosing your ownership.
Decentralization and freedom of speech
When I see what happens on twitter and other traditional social media, it becomes scary to put so much trust in these companies. There are some things that shouldn't belong to anybody. My content should remain mine at all times. Only true decentralization can do that.
Voting and democracy
This is an aspect that hasn't really been explored so far but games like Splinterlands or the Hive blockchain are using the principle of voting to decide things that are relevant for the ecosystem. This could be a major use case for crypto in the long run.
Crypto is not dead but not all crypto will survive
When I look at all the use cases where crypto is really powerful from a technological standpoint, I realize that very few projects have functional instances of them.
There are so many crypto projects that draw their whole value from a kind of roadmap that promises that things will be achieved one day. I believe that only real technological applications will survive in the long run. Of the many thousands of tokens, not many will have a real utility and most of them will die.
What are the blockchains that today offer many of these use cases in a functional manner?
The list of these blockchains is pretty small in my opinion. Some of them have big deficiencies in their architecture that will prevent them from playing efficient roles. Only very few of these blockchains are ready for real usage. In my opinion Hive offers probably the best technology among all of them. Also it's been working for several years. You can do all the things I mentioned above. Of course not everything is perfect but I don't see any better option anywhere.
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