Crypto will only succeed when it’s not crypto anymore

There’s no doubt we’ve had a massive shake up in people’s confidence in the crypto market over the past few months. A lot of investors that jumped into crypto have been burned; their get rich quick plans destroyed by the weight of a looming global recession. And if you ask people, many believe this market crash has proven that if NFTs are “just JPEGs,” crypto is “just a ponzi.”

I wrote about the?utility of the blockchain and NFTs?last time, applying it to the automotive industry, showing examples of the technology improving logistics, production, performance, and ownership, and wrote that fundamentally the distrust surrounding web3 isn’t a technology problem, but a PR problem.

This is exponentially true for cryptocurrencies, especially when most people’s exposure to the technology are hit pieces disguised as news when Bitcoin crashes (even if it’s following the traditional stock market trend at the time), or Elon Musk tweeting about a coin with a cartoon dog on it.

Coupled with the fact that the blockchain and cryptocurrencies are misunderstood, or not understood at all, and poorly explained, or not explained at all, and this distrust falls squarely into the “people fear what they don’t understand” box.

But we’ve all been here before, and not too long ago either. In 2014 Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz capitalized on people’s distrust and confusion surrounding “the cloud” with their comedy film?Sex Tape, where a couple’s sex tape accidentally gets uploaded to the cloud and no one knows how it happened, how to retrieve it, or what the hell the cloud even is.

“Nobody understands the cloud, it’s a mystery.” And nobody understands the blockchain, or cryptocurrencies, or web3 — it’s a mystery.

But bear with me here, if you just clicked play above, you streamed that video from the cloud. If you watched Netflix last night, you streamed that content from the cloud too. Your phone’s photos are likely backed up to the, you guessed it, iCloud. This website, yep, hosted on the cloud. In fact,?everything?today is hosted on the cloud, because the technology improved what came before it, made it more cost efficient, created a whole new industry around it, and while it confused the hell out of Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz to begin with, it went on to seamlessly integrate with absolutely everything we all did. Spotify doesn’t market itself as streaming music from the cloud, it’s just about streaming music.

And this is where crypto needs to go. Right now if you tap on a Square payment gateway or any other for that matter, you don’t think about the technology behind the scenes transferring money from your account to someone else’s, you just care about walking away with your purchase. You don’t think about the infrastructure your bank is built on, or how value is stored or transferred from one place to the other. It just happens. The blockchain and cryptocurrencies have the ability to improve this process, make it more cost efficient, and create a whole new industry around it without you even knowing. This new technology has the ability to do the same for almost every other industry too, not just finance, just how the cloud improved everything online, not just personal file storage.

If it is to survive, the blockchain, web3, and cryptocurrency need to stop being about what they are, and start focusing on what they do and what they offer the end user. Businesses need to start incorporating web3 without making a song and dance about it, and people need to use it without even knowing they are using it, because most people still don’t understand how the cloud works — but they no longer care, they just care that it does.