Don’t Follow the Suits, Follow the Weirdos
Cryptocurrency was invented by a guy who liked message boards.
Then a young developer who thought decentralization could go even further kicked off a world computer with a white paper and some emails.
The big wins in crypto are going to come from the punks, the hippies, the malcontents and the contrarians. What I’m saying is: In this very bullish season, don’t be enraptured by the suits.
This article is excerpted from The Node, CoinDesk’s daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here.
We see the allure of the suits here at CoinDesk in a very direct way. For a few years, we saw an onslaught of corporate blockchain accelerators and pilot projects that were never about … well, anything. It was obvious “innovation theater,” but toward what end? Who knows?
I appreciate the allure. The whole argument to be “grown-up” seems very convincing. Yes, the future of blockchains is probably enterprise something something … it sounded truthy.
Now the suits are back and it looks like this time they are here for real. Instead of “blockchain not bitcoin” it seems like we have hit an inflection point where a lot of the rich guys hold a little BTC and maybe some ETH.
So is it all “game over” once Goldman or Morgan Stanley opens up a crypto division?
Game, set and match. Satoshi has won! Sooo … Wall Street can take it from here, right?
Just today, Visa announced a demo project using an Ethereum stablecoin. So this is all … settled?
That’s not where I’d place my bets.
I would suggest continuing to look at what the tinkerers are up to.
The method works; it’s where I have invested my reporting attention and it keeps paying off. Like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) now? I first wrote about them in 2018. I told you about OpenSea three years before the venture capitalists at a16z dropped $23 million into the NFT marketplace. Were you happy about the UNI airdrop? This guy gave you a heads up about Uniswap a year before it started to shake up the space. The DeFi summer of 2020 was wild, right? Well, I first told you about the decentralized finance market Compound in 2018 and I was digging into MakerDAO regularly through 2019.
It’s not hard to find real stuff out on the edge. That’s where all of it is.
The suits show up when sectors become safe, after they plateau. They show up when something can be turned into a nice, predictable little business. They show up once it’s boring. If they manage to show up early, they show up to make it boring.
DAOs
The opposite of the suits is DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations.
The first big one didn’t work out great. Shortly after that debacle, MakerDAO decided to get a lot more formal, though the protocol itself continued to be governed by token holders.
For a while, it might have looked like the suits, with their proofs-of-concept and press releases and sticky note-covered innovation labs were winning. But that had clearly changed by last summer when we saw DeFi take off and people started to once again get excited about organizations that exist entirely on blockchains, with no formal instantiation in the legally governed world.
The most prominent DAO in this space doesn’t even really use that branding. It is Yearn Finance. I often wonder how many people who put their assets into Yearn think about the fact that there are a bunch of actual people behind this thing. What might be called the “staff” of Yearn put a ton of time into it, they make a lot of money from it and – at least insofar as I have ever been able to determine – none of that occurs under the auspices of any sort of formal organization as you or I might normally expect. No company. Just a baby giant, growing.
We got a rare glance under the hood about how it works when Tracheopteryx, who functions in a sort of chief operations officer-ish role within Yearn, spoke at ETH Denver:
But basically, we have a bunch of smart contracts written by an enigmatic DeFi artiste that attracted a bunch of other savvy degens to get involved and start suggesting ways to juice the already considerable profits on assets dropped into Yearn.
This is not normal. This is weird. Yet, Yearn and other DAOs like it will grow and shake things up further.
Facebook/Libra
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Facebook’s foray into crypto: born as libra, downgraded to diem.
The social network thought that it could convince global regulators to allow it to upend the way money works by asking nicely and showing up at a lot of legislative hearings.
It turned out that asking permission to disrupt global industries doesn’t work that well.
Zuckerberg and Co. never really appeared to have actual conviction about decentralization. The company needed to diversify its revenue streams if Facebook was going to let users communicate privately, as the company had been promising in 2019.
But playing nice with the global money cops didn’t work out, so it moved on.
Actual change comes from folks too irascible to quit doing something because someone tells them it’s a bad idea or it doesn’t fit their conception of how we’ve always done things.
So if big banks and financial companies and payment firms want to hop in, cool, let them. But that’s not when the excitement starts. That’s when the excitement ends.
If you want excitement, keep your eyes on the folks with unicorns on their shirts, buzzes in their hair and/or chains hanging off … wherever — weirdos for the win.
Recommended News
-
Major supporter of the world-class fighting championship, CoinW, witnessed the new champion of Kunlun Fight!
The Madinat Arena in Dubai was packed to the rafters at the night of June 25, 2022, as thousands of Kunlun Fight fans gathered to witness the most intense night of combat in the history of the Kunlun Fight. Sponsored by CoinW, the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, the Kunlun Fight & Chan FC World Fighting Championships, brought international fighters from France, Italy, Belarus, Turkey, Iran and many other countries to present a blood-curdling feast for the senses, to fight fans. The Fighting Championship CoinW witnessed the new champion of…
-
Dumbo = a combination of SocialFI+DEFI2.0
The traditional social and content platforms are not only controlled by the project team, but all profits are also taken away by the project team. Also affected by the policy, we hope to build a decentralized, completely unmanned operation and management, operation, control, users have 100% privacy and content ownership, account ownership of the blockchain social platform. Project Description Dumbo is a joint collaboration between the Jumbo Innovation Lab and the well-known community PEOPLE. Based on the DEFI2.0 economic model and invitation mechanism, it will build WEB3 SocialFI in the…
-
Thales: We’re building a whole new economic system
Thales, the first lightweight, high-performance parallel chain in the Polka ecosystem, has received a $10 million investment from ZKfund, Holo Capital, and Digital Assets Investment, which will be used for the development of Thales’ economic system layer Hayek, DAO governance layer Plato, and storage network layer IPS (IPS-Thales). Introduction to Thales The Thales project is made up of Hayek, an economic system layer, Plato, a DAO governance layer, and IPS, a storage network layer (IPS-Thales). Although the consensus mechanism of Thales is NPOS, unlike Poca, Thales rewards not only…
-
Forget Buying the Dip, MicroStrategy Buys $15M of Bitcoin as It Nears the All-Time High
Business analytics firm MicroStrategy has made yet another large bitcoin (BTC, -0.15%) purchase, buying a further $15 million worth. MicroStrategy announced Friday it purchased approximately 262 more BTC at an average price per coin of $57,146, just a little over $1,000 away from the cryptocurrency’s all-time high. This latest purchase brings the firm’s total bitcoin holdings to around 91,326, bought for an average of $24,214 apiece. At the time of writing, this is equal to around $5.1 billion, compared to the approximate $2.21 billion MicroStrategy paid for them. The company’s share price has partly recovered from a…
-
1 million Chaingers, let the world hear your voice!
The total locked-in value of decentralised finance is now a staggering 310 billion and the market keeps on growing as more and more investors are starting to shift towards DeFi; which is great news because the blockchain industry can’t possibly grow without the support of its world wide users, and at the same time, traffic is the main thing that will keep projects going in the long run. As the DeFi industry continues to evolve, Chainge, a coded financial platform customised for both institutional and individual investors, is in full swing…
-
If Bitcoin Starts Closing Below the 50-Day SMA It May Mean Deeper Pullback Ahead
Bitcoin fell sharply on Sunday, dipping well below the 50-day simple moving average (SMA) support for the first time in six months. While the decline looks typical of a bull market correction, it could be extended further if prices find acceptance under the 50-day SMA, according to one analyst. “The loss of [bullish] momentum is only short-term in nature, but we would view consecutive closes below the 50-day SMA as a reason to move to the sidelines,” Katie Stockton, technical analyst and managing partner of Fairlead Strategies, told CoinDesk in…
-
European royal noble favorite essential oil workshop Estrella Choelus
“Estrella Choelus,” translated from ancient Greek as “Estrella Chœlus,” originally meant a star that was permanent, pleasant, and beautiful.In 1844, while refining essential oils, Galio di Vincenzo, a vegetable oil refiner, discovered that the fragrance they gave off when heated not only made people feel good, but also cured his perennial insomnia.For this reason, he opened an essential oil treatment workshop Estrella Chœlus in a small town to treat anxiety, insomnia and depression by heating essential oil.Guests could not only enjoy the fragrance treatment in the store, but also they could buy back…
-
4JNET is positioned to outperform Safemoon through a unique mechanism
Safemoon launched BSC on March 8, which rose by 200 times within less a month. That is to day, if RMB 10,000 is invested to buy Safemoon in March 3, you will have RMB 2,000,000 in April. It is pointed out that although Safemoon’s price has fallen to $0.000003, the investors may still expose to high risks if they buy Safemoon now. What can Safemoon be used for? The team frankly confessed that it is useless; if there must be one, it takes advantages of a unique mechanism to stimulate people to hoard…
-
Bitcoin Gains Ahead of $6B Options Expiry After Market Finds $50K Floor
Bitcoin rose for the first time in three days as traders looked past Friday’s record $6 billion expiration of option contracts to a stronger market next week as April begins. “Returns after prior bitcoin options expiration dates have tended to be positive,” David Grider, strategist at Fundstrat, told clients in an email. “The market is calm based on bitcoin VIX [a volatility index] falling, with room to fall further.” BTC was changing hands at roughly $52,700 as of 12:03 UTC (8:04 a.m. ET), up 2.9% on the day. An oversold signal on Thursday…
-
Ban, Minister Says
India’s Minister of State for Finance Anurag Thakur said the government needs to study national security risks posed by virtual currencies before making any decision on their legality. “We understand there is immense interest in these virtual currencies, but we also need to look at national security and security of Indians and individuals,” Thakur said while addressing an event organized by Entrepreneurs’ Organisation Punjab on Saturday. Thakur took a jab at the high price volatility of cryptocurrencies, saying that these coins often chart 10x price moves in weeks. “That doesn’t happen in…
