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- Does crypto feel boring?
Does crypto feel boring?
Or is it just me?
Hey Everyone! Welcome to the latest Web3 Rewind. As always, please send your thoughts and prayers to [email protected] — I’d love to hear what you think and to know if there are crypto topics you’d like us to cover in the newsletter. Cheers! — Matthew Leising, editor in chief, Decential Media
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Does crypto feel boring?
Is it me or does crypto feel a bit boring at the moment? Those aren’t words I’ve said before, as far as I know, but there seems to be something about the recent range-bound market -- since about March or so -- that feels limp, impotent.
Next year I’ll have been covering crypto for a decade. Recently I’ve found myself defending the industry in the face of kneejerk stupidity from the mainstream press and the cringe of the crypto world that’s best exemplified on crypto Twitter (when’s the next fight, bro?). Then there’s the bit about most of them being in the bag for Trump, and how proud they are of it. In these defenses though, I think I’ve been harboring a frustration that I’ve kept to myself. And that is that it’s still hard to make the case for blockchain tech to a normie. It doesn’t touch mainstream Western culture among the chattering classes yet. I believe it will, but we come back to that hoary cliché I mentioned last week – it’s still early.
Seriously? I was rolling my eyes in 2018 when I heard someone solemnly say that. (Just a caveat, I’m not addressing the huge impact crypto has had on developing countries, the hyperinflation disasters of the world and the remittance revolution it’s provided. This is aimed at the 20 or so countries that won the most medals at the Paris Olympics). It feels like it’s time for there to be a widely-adopted crypto app for something other than making money. Doesn’t it?
It's probably me. Of course, it’s not like there haven’t been ridiculous incidents lately. Did you hear about the fake hack public relations stunt pulled by Near protocol? I guess a faked hack is better than a real one, but am I supposed to be impressed? Or care? Because I don’t. I want a Netscape moment for crypto, with a large middleman going out of business due to a decentralized option.
Another caveat, this is not to negate the amazing technological progress made on Ethereum in recent years, or the emergence of Polygon and Avalanche (and, holding my nose, Tron) as viable smart-contract platforms. Remember the Merge? If you forgot, it was when Ethereum devs changed the consensus protocol to proof of stake from proof of work. It amazed me at the time how seamlessly it was pulled off, and I still believe that, yet it was a type of tech innovation that’s hard to grasp; if the power grid to my house is improved, that’s great, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Speaking of proof of stake, staking – or pledging your Ether to earn interest -- is certainly an interesting evolution. The yield is about 4 percent a year right now, compared with 0.46 percent on a U.S. savings account. We wrote about the effect the Ether exchange-traded funds are having on the wider ecosystem this week, which don’t offer investors interest income from staking. It reminded me of how important the pure economic value of Ether is right now. You could be mistaken for thinking the money-hungry greed of much of this market is the only thing holding it together.
The Wall Street Journal had a great podcast recently about a junior banker at Bank of America who died after months of serious overwork. In a first-world problem sense, I can’t think of a sadder way to go, having given your life to a Wall Street bank that runs on fear, hazing, intimidation and humiliation. It’s fucking tragic, yet these are the types of folks who make up a big contingent in crypto right now. Risk takers should always be welcome, yet I sure hope they don’t continue to dominate the use cases for blockchain assets.
Another story we covered this week featured RAC, the uber producer who’s been a blockchain native since 2017. He worked with Ujo Music, an early ConsenSys-backed startup I remember seeing in the Bushwick office of Joe Lubin’s shop. (I highly recommend RAC’s album EGO, put out with Ujo.) RAC, whose given name is Andre Anjos, has been through many on-chain music experiments over the years, some wildly successful and some not so much. But he keeps plugging away at it. He’s a co-founder of Oscillator, which is releasing a music-social graph app that’s open source and decentralized. It’s meant to connect artists directly with fans, among lots of other aspirations. That’s not boring. I hope it’s wildly successful and musicians can begin to retake their audience from the steel jaws of record labels, concert promoters and streaming platforms.
They’re building it. They keep working, even as some industry watchers have the audacity to say the space is boring. Yeah, okay, fine. It’s me. — Matthew Leising, editor in chief, Decential Media
Quote of the Week from Decential Media
Who was at Ethereal 2018 in Brooklyn when it was like 400 degrees outside?
“Across these projects, there’s a common language of belonging, and an enduring pursuit to identify that ‘thing’ that can connect the pieces – without being “one platform to rule them all.” “Throughout all these experiments that [Jack and I] had been working on,” Anjos told me, “we were always working on, ‘how do we connect artists and fans?’”
"Jack and I had always wanted to start something,” he continued. “And then on a personal level, Jack had a baby. Not far behind I also had a baby” — a child whose grandparents are Alec Baldwin and Kim Bassinger –“and we were just like, ‘what should we do now?’
“We should start a company,” he concluded, wryly, “cause that makes sense."
— Andre Anjos, aka RAC, from Logs and Data Backpacks: How RAC and Jack Spallone's Oscillator Is Trying to Fill the Social-Music Void
Stupid stuff
“Social media, however, is increasingly under the microscope of regulators and law enforcement. Posts can be found in the evidence lockers of many high-profile crypto lawsuits, and watchdogs like the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority have already implemented rules specifically for cryptoasset marketing. “
That’s Bloomberg News opining on the aforementioned fake hack of the Near protocol. The PR agency that greenlit this must be the same one behind the Twitter rebrand, which took a brand name out of the lexicon as an active verb. Oh, wait, that was Elon, wasn’t it? Never mind. — ML
That’s it! Until next week, ML
Have you read the definitive history of Ethereum? No? Well then get your copy of Out of the Ether while you can.