In the early days of bitcoin, the industry made a grave mistake; they bundled all the projects together and dubbed them "cryptocurrencies". The term cryptocurrency has hindered the space more than any event, hack or uninformed opinion out of Wall Street. It assumes that everything in crypto is attempting to become a global currency; this couldn't be further from the truth.
This weekend we explore real use cases of the emerging decentralised finance world. In the same way our current financial system possesses core financial primitives such as the ability to pay, exchange, lend, borrow, and hedge, so does the decentralised world.
2021 has been a rewarding year for anyone participating in crypto markets with bitcoin up 20,40% and Ethereum up 246%. Whilst the two most well-known crypto networks have done well, the best performance can be found in the broader crypto landscape.
Investment at its most basic is just deferred consumption. Like other financial assets, Bitcoin requires market participants to defer their consumption today by investing in something they believe will allow for additional consumption in the future. This is the implicit idea behind almost every investment. Why would anyone invest if they weren't expecting their wealth to grow as a by-product of making that investment?
Bitcoin is legal tender. These are words we didn't really expect to hear in 2021. Yet, somehow, on the 8th of June 2021, in Central America, the country of El Salvador passed a bill that officially recognises bitcoin as legal tender in its country. It took 12 short years to go from the online chatrooms of Cyberpunks and computer scientists to nation-state money. To say we are proud is an understatement.
"It's imperative for survival and growth. Without regulated instruments like an ETF, the industry will tread water, because there will only be insignificant institutional adoption."