Forget the Great Reset. Members of the industry known as “crypto” (or is it “blockchain,” “digital assets” or “distributed ledger technology?”) attending this week’s World Economic Forum under the shadow of the crisis known as “FTX” are spurring a great rebrand.
In the wake of the Bahamas-based exchange’s meltdown, “crypto” and “NFTs” (non-fungible tokens) have become trigger words for skeptics who dismiss this technology as hot air with no utility – much as “blockchain” was viewed in 2018 around the initial coin offering (ICO) bubble, when, in one notorious case, the Long Island Iced Tea company infamously renamed itself Long Blockchain Corp.
Hence, there was talk of a new lexicon (we’re stuck with “crypto” for now) as business leaders tried to convince policymakers attending the talkfest in Davos, Switzerland, of the need for constructive regulation or sought deals, engagement or just acceptance by leaders of mainstream companies who’d also turned out in force.
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I’m sure many readers of this column will recoil at this effort. Some may even see it as a centralizing power grab.
Maybe that’s fair. This annual gathering in the Swiss Alps, often cited for hypocrisy, empty talk and elitism, is a lightning rod among many who believe in the potential for cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies to upend the existing, inequitable global economy. You don’t have to share the conspiracy theorists’ views of WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset” idea to have concerns about the many Davos member companies and institutions whose business models perpetuate that system’s exploitative, centralized power structure.
But it’s also clear that “crypto” is now being widely…
