Crypto’s ongoing crisis is an opportunity for realignment

It’s not a great day to be in crypto. Perhaps you’ve seen an article (or 20) about this. Perhaps you’ve been on Twitter, where our detractors are cackling gleefully over every headline, each one more harbinger-of-doom-esque than the next. To be fair, things are going badly. Crashed, collapsed, erased, plunged, obliterated and imploded are the operative verbs in most coverage, and they’re not being used incorrectly or in an exaggerated manner. There’s no putting a positive spin on a week where $400 billion in value just evaporated. Even for the most furiously determined buy-the-dippers and diamond-handed believers who feed off detractors and never say die, it’s dire out there.

I’m not interested in making a case for buying the dip or for dipping out forever and getting into, say, stockpiling gold bars in an underground bunker. But I do see this feral, angry, rabid bear market we find ourselves careening through as an opportunity for some much-needed course correction. I’ve argued before that the crypto space at large has lost the plot, forsaking the borderline revolutionary potential of decentralized finance for an inescapable horde of stupid-looking monkeys. I’m not the only person in crypto who feels this way, let alone the most prominent. Vitalik Buterin made similar points in his widely-read profile in the March 2022 issue of Time magazine.

As crypto has soared in value and volume, Vitalik Buterin has watched the world he created evolve with a mixture of pride and dread, writes @andrewrchow.

“Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong,” @VitalikButerin tells TIME https://t.co/fsvL4Mx9uE

— TIME (@TIME) March 21, 2022

Comeuppances and consequences

Twitter is never a great sample audience, but given the sorry state of crypto’s public reputation, it’s not unfathomable or even unexpected that this crash is being met with derision and schadenfreude by people outside the space. From rampant scams to ugly nonfungible tokens (NFT) to carbon-spewing mining, we’ve given the outside world plenty of reason to not only be skeptical of crypto. Many people still think we’re a bunch of tasteless bros duking it out on an unregulated stock market imitation whose comeuppance has arrived. Even before this crash, some writers and publications openly speculated that a crypto bubble burst would push a group of mostly male, newly broken, and deeply disillusioned people toward fascism and away from democratic values and,…