Happy Nice Mall

Larger players have also failed to crack the peer-to-peer crypto. PayPal and Venmo (owned by PayPal) claim to have supported crypto since early 2021. But a closer look at their services, platforms allow US customers to buy, sell or trade crypto—invest, basically—can’t pay for purchases or send crypto to other users. If “the future of money is here”, as Coinbase claims on its website, apparently there aren’t many ordinary people who can do with money in the future.

Although it is difficult to spend cryptocurrencyIt’s still pretty easy to lose it, and the losses increase as the industry grows. Without the protections established in traditional financial systems (protocols that require authentication for financial transactions, such as Know Your Customer or KYC), scammers cost crypto investors—often the individuals who are the target of all these ads.more than $14 billion last year, almost double the amount lost the previous year. Losses continue to increase. For example, in late March, Sky Mavis reported that a hacker had subsequently stolen $625 million worth of cryptocurrencies from the blockchain behind its pay-to-play game AxieInfinity.

Even if their wallets are not hacked or their crypto assets are not liquidated, individuals extreme volatility crypto markets; value of bitcoin fell more than 20% multiple times in a single day only in the last six months.

“I’m worried about access; I worry about abuse,” says Afua Bruce, a social policy and technologist and author of the book. Next Technology. “As we develop new technologies, we need to find out who the communities we are building are. Can they use it? What does sustainability look like? How does it actually strengthen the communities we say we are building? I don’t know if these questions are being asked for blockchain.”

In fact, the crypto industry’s relationship with its community seems like a predatory affair. “we” inWAGMI“It is a small group of predictable players who thrive on the risks ordinary people take. As a matter of fact, as of December 2021, 0.01% of Bitcoin owners control 27% of the currency– A much more skewed ratio than dollar ownership in the US, which isn’t a pretty statistic to begin with. And because they are not backed by any real assets, cryptocurrencies gain in value as the demand for them increases. As more people choose to buy, VCs and crypto managers watch their portfolios trend up and to the right. Marketing in technology has many uses: It can raise awareness about a new technology or help build a user base before making money. Both things happen in crypto. But if marketing convinces enough people to convert real money to cryptocurrencies, it could literally pay the industry’s bills.

Crypto companies have already made people on their executive teams billionaires – like Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old CEO of FTX, who started his short career in traditional finance and is now worth an estimated $24 billion. Bankman-Fried is currently the richest American in crypto, but there were six other “crypto billionaires” in the cryptocurrency world. Forbes’ 2021 list of the richest Americans. And that’s only in the USA; Binance CEO Changpeng ZhaoHaving found a new base in Dubai since China banned crypto, it was worth $96 billion at the end of 2021 (but had dropped to $63 billion in early April). While the Web3 domain promises an egalitarian utopia, the current distribution of crypto wealth is more closely aligned with late capitalism. “Capitalism is more than happy to sell a real product and make a small profit from it,” says crypto critic and author David Golumbia. Bitcoin Policy. “But selling a scam is even happier. Never underestimate the power of a lot of money and fraud to persuade a lot of people to do something.” And the fortunes of these crypto billionaires continue to rise as more and more people enter the vision the ads portray.

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

David Golumbia

The next step in regulation will significantly shape the future of consumer crypto. Last year, Facebook shuts down emerging cryptocurrency—Diem, formerly called Libra—after serious regulatory scrutiny. Probably won’t be the last to go. Federal agencies have recently been more-aggressive actions against some crypto exchanges for offering what they see as unlicensed investment products, and in October 2021 the U.S. Department of Justice issued a task force to investigate how crypto markets facilitate illegal activities such as money laundering. President Biden in March signed an executive order It is leading financial institutions to create a complete regulatory strategy for crypto, and the US, like many other countries, is trying to create a regulated digital currency called a CBDC (for “central bank digital currency”). These are certainly not cryptocurrencies, but they can offer similar levels of efficiency. Currently, many crypto exchanges are trying to limit volatility by using private stablecoins, a class of cryptocurrency pegged to a real asset like the dollar. If the US creates a CBDC, it could compete with these coins or even cause the government to ban them altogether.. FTX CEO Bankman-Fried predicts that the decisions of the US Federal Reserve will be the biggest drivers of the crypto market in the coming months of 2022.

Still, regulation has its limitations, as we’ve seen with traditional banking. With so much money flowing into crypto and so many Silicon Valley power players investing in its success, the industry could find a way to thrive even with severe restrictions. Five years from now, Web3 startups may still be trying to understand how crypto can be useful to ordinary people, but we will all feel the environmental and societal impacts of this turbulent moment for a long time to come.

SELMAN DESIGN

While the consumer cryptocurrency still resembles a pioneer town complete with gold prospecting and snake oil vendors, the non-consumer landscape presents a very different picture. Currently, businesses such as corporate banking services, pharmaceutical giants, film development companies and international shipping firms use blockchains for transparency and efficiency. Such efforts can bring old, slow and sometimes paper-based processes into the digital age and even help industries meet new regulatory requirements.

Ripple, a company with more than 500 employees in nine offices around the world, is an example. Like a much, much larger version of Paymobil’s crypto-powered money transfer service, Ripple uses its own blockchain token as a bridge between currencies, and hundreds of corporates including Bank of America, Santander and Japan’s SBI Remit allows the customer to reduce operational. costs resulting from time zone differences and manual reconciliation processes.

Contrary to the radical rhetoric of its crypto contemporaries, Ripple uses the speed provided by digitized currencies to improve legacy banking processes, not replace them. In keeping with this reform-unchangeable stance, RippleX managing director Monica Long sees regulations and even CBDCs as part of the evolution of blockchain for businesses and more generally financial operations over the next few years. “As crypto-finance becomes a critical element of the new normal, customers and consumers will benefit from improved infrastructure, user experience, regulatory clarity and interoperability,” she says.

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The most industry-transforming use case so far—perhaps the least sizzling one—could be the MediLedger Network and its custodian Chronicled. In 2013, the US government Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Security ActStating that by 2023, the pharmaceutical industry must create a digital system to track prescription drugs to prevent counterfeiting. Healthcare and life sciences are notorious for old, non-interoperable systems, and the requirements of the law required an entirely new way of doing business. Susanne Somerville, CEO of Chronicled, wondered whether a private blockchain (a closed, permissioned system as opposed to public blockchains like Bitcoin) could offer a secure, shared environment in which pharmaceutical players like Pfizer and Gilead can work together. Chronicled launched the MediLedger Network, a group of big pharma companies, in 2019, after years of working on business rules and goals. Chronicled offers a number of services such as a non-misleading directory of fake product IDs and access to real information. public pricing updates. These narrow solutions may not be what people typically associate with blockchain technology, but they are critical in the pharmaceutical industry. “Almost everyone is thinking about these super lofty ideas, and it’s hard to get there,” Somerville says. “But there are less sexy things that are actually basic.”

Ripple and MediLedger’s use of the blockchain could mean safer drugs and faster money transfers for ordinary people, without anyone needing to create a digital wallet or exchange coins. As for consumer crypto? If the industry’s deafening leap into a financial revolution sounds too good to be true, it’s because it’s true. Until we offer affordable, everyday uses and comprehensive protections against scams and fraud for new coins, we are better off sticking with cash and traditional banking systems than joining the parade of crypto boosters marching on our screens and in our cities.

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