The crypto community is still rather niche. The value of all cryptocurrencies in the world still only amounts to about $900 billion at the time of this writing. Four U.S. companies – Apple Inc. (ticker: AAPL), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Alphabet Inc. (GOOG, GOOGL) and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) – each have valuations greater than the sum of all the cryptocurrencies in circulation.
Considering the enormous size of the stock market, still just 58% of Americans own stock, according to a 2022 Gallup survey. Even fewer understand stocks well.
So it’s no surprise that the much smaller – and far more arcane – world of crypto, blockchains and decentralized finance, or DeFi, is poorly understood by the public at large.
One of the most prominent misconceptions about this space is that crypto is a dark and nefarious playground for bad actors or a haven for criminals. And bad actors, do, of course, exist in crypto – just as they do in any genre of human endeavor.
But crypto has some prominent advocates who see beyond the market fluctuations and negative headlines to a greater purpose for digital assets.
Among those is Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players of all time.
“The argument that [crypto] benefits bad guys occasionally doesn’t fly to me,” Kasparov, who also is a security ambassador for the software firm Avast, says in an interview at the Consensus conference in Austin, Texas. “Humans have a monopoly for evil. How can you stop progress by saying potentially it could be used” for ill? Kasparov asks.
In fact, cryptocurrency, blockchain technology and DeFi are all playing an important role in attempting to make our world a better place, and their potential is only beginning to be tapped.
Here are four examples of how cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology and DeFi are shaping the world for good:
- Funding dissidents and the oppressed.
- Rapid philanthropic fundraising.
- Documenting potential war crimes.
- An expanding pool of charity funds.
