The cryptocurrency economy is full of opportunity and innovation for anyone willing to take the time to learn it, even after the fall of FTX.
Key Details
- The fall of FTX less than a month ago shook the entire crypto economy, crashing markets, and nearly bankrupting several additional exchanges.
- However, the crash was only one part of the ongoing “Crypto Winter,” with the entire cryptocurrency economy cooling. Major currencies like Bitcoin are down 75.3% from their peaks in November 2021, when the price topped at nearly $69,000.
- Crypto evangelists remain confident in the future of the market and say that proper education and caution can protect users from unsafe exchanges, fraud, and dangers.
- Politicians and economists remain skeptical of the technology—and some don’t even foresee a future of the technology.
Why it’s Important
The future of cryptocurrency in the aftermath of FTX is unclear, but proponents still see a bright future ahead.
Dane Rose is the president of Vision People Project (VPP), an education product company. His company’s work is dedicated to promoting education in the hopes of creating mass adoption of Web3 and blockchain technologies by encouraging people to willingly embrace cryptocurrency.
He believes giving people the tools to protect themselves and navigate crypto spaces will lead to mass adoption.
“You need to be informed and educated and there really isn’t a great central place for that. Our project is trying to create a simple hub to access and navigate the space. If people had any base-level understanding of FTX’s tokenomics, they would’ve never bought into it knowing their money would be locked into liquidity. This is simple knowledge in this space but unknown to the regular person,” Rose tells Leaders Media.
Possible Solutions
Rose sees blockchain as the future of finance but he is realistic in knowing that people are skeptical about the technology, which has been mired in accusations of fraud, volatility, and corruption. He says a person who is interested in learning to invest in the technology needs assistance to learn how tokens work, what the reputation each exchange has, how to use wallets, and which stablecoins they ought to look into as they’re learning.
Before investing in crypto, it is recommended that you talk with brokers or exchange operators—Fidelity Investments, which does trade in crypto, has a vast knowledge base. And recently Bloomberg News published a helpful glossary.
VPP offers free consultation services for those interested in learning more and online resources for terminology, news, and trends are widely available. VPP says it will be launching its own “Edu-Tech” product in February 2023 to offer new investors opportunities to learn through experience and earn passive income in the process.
The Problem
Rose says that Vision People Project has seen great success following the fall of FTX. While the market is in a weaker place, volatility is nothing new to crypto markets. Bitcoin’s unusual spike in value in 2021 to $69,000 doesn’t reflect that the average price has varied between $2,500 and $10,000 for the majority of its lifespan.
The federal government’s response to the fall of FTX is something crypto advocates have taken umbrage with though. Congress and the White House are moving in the direction of cracking down on cryptocurrency through stronger regulations, but Rose sees the solution as being more simple—by having blockchain developers regulate their own code.
“The outcry that has resulted, which we disagree with, is calling for more regulation on users which doesn’t make sense. The only way Sam Bankman-Fried was able to access funds was because he had a backdoor that made him privy to every dollar that came through the system where he was able to move those funds and change public-facing financial records. If the code was regulated without backdoors, a regulatory agency would be needless. You can regulate the code from within the code. It’s very simple to do,” says Rose.
Alternative Viewpoint
Cryptocurrencies have developed many prominent critics though. Congress has seen bipartisan support for increasing consumer protections and regulations against currencies, with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) taking the lead in the call for comprehensive changes.
The collapse of FTX has also led to many economic analysts declaring that cryptocurrency technology is on the way out and will never again reach its previous peaks of success. New York Times economist Paul Krugman spoke out against the viability of blockchain technology in a recent opinion piece, noting that institutions like FTX “more easily succumb to the temptation” of corruption much like traditional financial institutions.
Krugman doesn’t see cryptocurrency recovering from its ongoing “Crypto Winter.”
“We are, many people say, going through a ‘Crypto Winter.’ But that may understate the case. This is looking more and more like Fimbulwinter, the endless winter that, in Norse mythology, precedes the end of the world,” says Krugman.
