Has crypto become boring?

(Image: Ideogram.ai)

Raise your hand if articles and opinions about the world of crypto no longer interest you. If your eyes glaze over when the subject even comes up. Or, alternatively, if you want to jump up and slap the next person who mentions the word Bitcoin.

Me too. I have written two books on the subject. I make a living from it, invest in it, scan crypto news feeds all day, think about it far too much. More often than not it bores me silly.

I wonder about this. How can something so fundamentally transformative have worn itself out to the point that it has become a slightly aggravating background noise for most people?

I was recently invited to sit on a panel at the Franschhoek Literary Festival. The subject was The Future. The panellists had expertise in AI, crypto and future trends analysis. It was lively and fun, but during the Q&A session it was clear that the audience’s core interest was AI.

AI is the shiny new button. Crypto’s sheen in the zeitgeist has clearly dulled.

To which I respond with a huzzah. It marks the beginnings of maturity for this historically maligned and much misunderstood technology. This is not to say that innovation in the field has slowed down. On the contrary – fabulous new inventions keep making appearances in the wider crypto ecosystem. Some of the smartest brains on the planet are doing wonderful technological things in a realm laden with gravitas - expanding on the meaning of ‘trust’ and the societal mechanisms by which humans claim and protect ‘ownership ‘of their possessions, whether virtual or physical. 

And so we get to hear about new crypto-related arcana in terms suffused with inscrutable jargon, such as zero-knowledge proofs, MEV mitigation, proposer-builder separation, directed acyclic graphs, practical Byzantine fault tolerance, account abstraction, Layer 3, Layer 4...  All very heady stuff. Ingenious. Important. New.

So why the ennui?

According to Google Trends, searches using the word ‘crypto’ have fallen by 50% in the last 3 months.  I submit that the fundamental reason for this general loss of interest in the field is that the battle between crypto-believers and disbelievers has been won, and it has been won by crypto. The gladiator show is over, the audience is heading for the exits.

Crypto is now solidly institutionalised by the biggest (and some of the most conservative) asset managers in the world, like Blackrock and Fidelity. Bitcoin and stablecoins sit on the balance sheets of major corporations and countries, including the US government, which has taken ownership of billions in seized cryptocurrency (the proceeds of crimes) but has not yet chosen to convert it all to dollars, presumably because it is investment-grade .

A new blockchain-borne creature called real-world asset tokenization has been quickly embraced by almost every major global bank. It is now expected to be responsible for 10% of global assets (Boston Consulting Group forecast) as myriad asset ownership titles, from real estate to debt to equity, are expected to be lodged on various blockchains by 2030. Gaming has shed the last of its crypto reticence and is widely incorporating NFTs for in-game item ownership.

Furthermore, people barely mention the energy cost of mining these days, as the technology has become increasingly sustainable, with Bitcoin mining now among the greenest industries in the world.

Of course, there are still pockets of resistance. Some regulators in certain jurisdictions remain puce-faced, apoplectic about the march of crypto. None more so than Senator Elizabeth Warren in the US, who has based her entire campaign on stamping out crypto and is now becoming increasingly isolated from even her Democratic colleagues, some of whom voted with the Republicans for crypto-friendly regulations last week. 

Dubai, Portugal, UAE, Germany, Estonia, Malaysia and even Hong Kong have opened their arms to crypto investments and projects. Even Donald Trump has felt the change in public temperature and is calling on voters who love crypto to support him, promising both deregulation and nirvana.

Crypto and its plumbing (blockchain) is not interesting anymore because it simply works. It has proved to be a legitimate and increasingly non-volatile store of value, a trusted custodian of title deeds to both real and virtual assets, as well as a blazingly fast and secure set of payment rails which is used by everyone from PayPal to Visa.

This means that what we are seeing now are simply incremental improvements, including the ones with complicated names mentioned earlier. The days of complete startlers seem to be over. The race to innovate has given way to getting things to work a little faster, a little more securely, a little less expensively (as with any other technology). The architecture is now pretty much in place. The rest is detail.

So, fewer and fewer of us are moved to talk about crypto, to argue its merits and demerits. It is quietly fading into the background. A public utility. Reliable. Safe.

Boring. Maybe even forgettable.

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg. His new book It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now.