Crypto crash

The month of May 2022 will undoubtedly go down in the history books as a significant one in cryptocurrency folklore. What we have witnessed is a spectacular drop in the prices of cryptocurrencies (or crypto assets as some call them) across the board and in one specific case, the almost complete wiping out of the Terra UST stable coin and its associated cryptocurrency, LUNA.

The crash was not limited only to Altcoins, even the granddaddy of cryptocurrencies, the supposed store of value, Bitcoin, crashed from its highs of 2021 to almost half those prices. At the time of writing this newsletter, it was hovering around $30,000. Now, I won’t bore you with details of what could’ve caused this crash (you can read an explanation of the crypto crash here).

As much as many headlines and news are screaming about a crypto crash, we need to distinguish: it is the speculation in crypto prices that is crashing, but crypto technology is still in its infant stages and has not crashed.

Crypto, as inefficient as it is as a payment system in its different flavors currently, is here to stay. Adoption of new technologies does not happen overnight and typically, the path is never clear. Even in the early days of the internet, any who were experts then and are still experts today didn’t see the internet becoming as big as it is today and as important as it is today. However, our desire as humans for efficiency and improving our lives through interconnectedness speeded up the adoption of the internet with all its glitches and inefficiencies in the early years and decades.

Similar applies to the concept of cryptocurrencies. This might not be their final form as we refine them and find new use cases, one thing is almost certain though, decentralization and encryption are here to stay. Whether as a currency, a payment system, a store of value, a protocol, or a platform, is debatable. But the concept and technology are the next steps of progress in the digital technology journey.

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Fall from 2021 highs