The Current Crypto Crisis Is An Opportunity For Realignment

The value and reputation of the crypto market fell in May. His recovery is a chance to fix both.

Opinion

Not a good day to be in crypto. Maybe you've seen an article (or 20) about it. Maybe you've been on Twitter, where our haters cackle happily over each headline, each one more harbinger of doom than the next. To be fair, things are bad. Crashed, collapsed, erased, plunged, erased and imploded are the operative verbs in most news reporting, and they are not used incorrectly or exaggeratedly. It is impossible to put a positive spin on a week in which $400 billion in value has just evaporated. Even for the most furiously determined shoppers and diamond-handed believers who feed on haters and never say die, it's terrible there.

I'm not interested in advocating for buying the dip or diving in forever and getting into, say, storing gold bars in an underground bunker. But I see this wild, angry, raging bear market we're going through as an opportunity for a much-needed course correction. I've argued before that the crypto space as a whole has lost the plot, abandoning the borderline revolutionary potential of decentralized finance for an inescapable horde of dumb monkeys. I'm not the only person in crypto feeling this, let alone the most prominent. Vitalik Buterin made similar remarks in his widely read profile in Time magazine's March 2022 issue.

As the value and volume of crypto skyrocketed, Vitalik Buterin saw the world he created evolve with a mix of pride and awe, writes @andrewrchow.

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

— TIME (@TIME) March 21, 2022