Bitcoin is down 50 % from All Time High : The future is bright !

Bitcoin is down 50 % from All Time High : The future is bright !

The recent headlines around crypto currencies and NFTs have been overpoweringly negative. The collapse of the “stablecoin” TerraUSD is no stranger to this crypto winter mood. Last week-end, Christine Lagarde, ECB President, went as far as saying that cryptos are worthless. On the NFT front, after an exuberant 2021 when digital artist Beeple’s famous collage NFT??“Everyday : The first 5000 days” reached $69 million at an auction held by Christies (in March 2021), signals have been more mixed. The NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, for example, which had been bought for $2.9 million in march 2021, failed to attract more than $280 (sic !) when it was brought to auction in April 2022.

DeFi (Decentralised Finance) and NFTs represent the vast majority of use cases for blockchain technology as of today. DeFi has $225 billion of value locked in it and NFTs has a trading volume of $45 billion, with collectibles (think Bored Ape Yacht Club and Crypto Punks) representing about 60 % of that. As of today, other use cases weight financially much less. So when these two suffer drawbacks, the temptation for mainstream media to call it the doomsday of the blockchain economy is strong.

However looking back at how new technology penetrates our lives we see that bubbles are frequent and, as we all know, bubbles end up bursting! We can take for example the late 90’s with the explosion in numbers of internet start-ups and in their valuations which culminated with … the “dot com” crash of 2000. I remember the excitement of these times and how the brightest minds were all flocking to participate. Did the “dot com” crash annihilate this revolution ? On the contrary, Facebook was launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006, WhatsApp in 2009, Instagram in 2010, etc. Bubbles attract scammers and quick win players but also bright minds and real entrepreneurs as they put the spotlight on new technologies, provide enormous funding for research and development with its cohort of trials and errors which could not be possible in more conservative investment scenarios.

When I attended the Paris Blockchain Week Summit last month, I relived the excitement of the “dot com” era, with lots of energy, brain juice, uncertainty, early winners and a general desire for WAGMI (We are All Going to Make It). So the recent crypto “crash” could well be the necessary event to consolidate the base on which the web 3 economy will be built. The winners will not be built on lack of regulation or media hype as were some of the first wave winners, but will offer real UTILITY and SOLVE REAL ISSUES we are currently facing. In?Entertainment, subscription fatigue and aversion to advertisement for example, are two real issues that a decentralized, tokenized solution could solve ! In?Social Media,?unclear Personal Data usage and low remuneration of content creators are certainly in need of improvements. Web 3’s ownership economy can very well solve that ! And??who would not like to earn money from playing a?game?rather than having to buy it at a premium price. STEPN and AxieInfinity have already demonstrated that it is possible !

So yes, in the new web3 era, the future is bright !?