I'm sure many redditors are getting informed by the current banking crisis. I'm sure a fraction of redditors like myself have personally been exposed to the onchain contagion from that crisis. I'm confident many crypto actors have a refreshed appreciation for noncorrelated assets and reliable stores of value like Bitcoin & Ethereum. I'm also confident that many commenters have a growing interest in developing social networks that are censorship-resistant and composable.
The point is, we're here for trust minimization & financial stability, and the events of these two weeks should be a wakeup call.
Firstly, regardless of what the banks and other traditional institutions are doing, two central exchanges feuding over their respective stablecoins of choice, namely Binance advertising opportunities to short USDC & and Coinbase's regulated delisting of BUSD (iirc there are also other Paxos tokens as well), doesn't help us. I think that between FTX, BlockFi, & Celsius, as well as the regulatory risks of central exchanges as on/off-ramps should be enough of a spark for figuring out how crypto banks itself. Are we going to fall for the next scam to come along? Are we going to sit around and gamble until all the tokens are delisted and all of the VPNs get compromised? There needs to be custodial standards, including & beyond Proof of Reserves, that need to be deployed with prejudice.
Secondly, and I know the reservations many will have to this, but there's so much opportunity to make connections in social media posts to all of the actively growing projects. And I mean objective growth, aka shipping new product specifications, shipping new code, getting audits done, and making verifiable partnerships. If all we do is spend time sifting through promotional crap in the comments, then I'm not optimistic that this tech can be as impactful as its community remains misinformed. In this spirit, hopefully we can connect popular & trending topics to the organized & pinned topics that invite everyone to coordinate on the content that let us win in the long run.
Thirdly, and I hate to admit this, but we give way too much limelight to people that have absolutely no concern, or have convinced themselves, that they have the privilege to gamble with other people's money. If there's any project that participated in the bank run, capitulating on DAI or USDC at the nth hour at 90 cents on the dollar, wouldn't you like to know who those were? Wouldn't you like to know if there are any NFT projects where the treasury disappeared because someone desperately had to make risky trades trying to make it all back? I'd like to think that we're all interested in crypto because it's a disruptive, cutting-edge technology. not because we're easy marks. in that context, there should be a standard, privacy-preserving reputation. additionally, the analytics tooling we use to track scams and hacks could be used to make sure when the same bad actors come back for more money, at least a few people can raise the red flags before anyone loses money. I'm not touching any ICOs without this being common practice.
Finally, crypto is nothing if it cannot be used in real life. We're not going to spend the rest of our lives showing people a monkey jpeg on our phones. We're not going to keep watching ads on TV for exchanges. We're not going to spend the rest of our lives watching Bitcoin/USD NGU. For many use cases, there needs to be a corporate veil & limited liability. For contributors in crypto, there needs to be benefits & protections. These are not DAOs, but DAOs should be able to coordinate around them. If we establish a standard approach to building protocols to meet IRL needs without banking, then the next consistent bull market won't just be a central banker in a suit & tie giving us a green light. It will be our own independent growth, our own innovation, our keys & our coins. We're not going to have to answer to FUD, because there will be a solid footing from which crypto continues to survive, on our terms.
But, TL;DR, this latest banking crisis and the central banks response should not be the focal reason why our market moves and people lose money.
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