Captain Kirk and neo-Dadaists. Repugnant markets and legendary cryptographers. “Digital couture” auctioned by CryptoKitties developers. Distributed autonomous art organizations. A keynote speech looking back from 2047 at the near-apocalypse of 2026, from which we were saved by a new, fully tokenized economy. Yes, that’s right: NYC Blockchain Week has begun. Where to begin? I suppose […]
Captain Kirk and neo-Dadaists. Repugnant markets and legendary cryptographers. “Digital couture” auctioned by CryptoKitties developers. Distributed autonomous art organizations. A keynote speech looking back from 2047 at the near-apocalypse of 2026, from which we were saved by a new, fully tokenized economy. Yes, that’s right: NYC Blockchain Week has begun.
Where to begin? I suppose with context. This week’s series of cryptocurrency conferences kicked off with “Ethereal,” hosted by Consensys, a company/incubator/studio mostly devoted to decentralized software and services built atop the Ethereum blockchain… although they also acquired an asteroid-mining company last year. Subsequently they laid off 13% of their staff, in the depths of the notorious “crypto winter” that followed the crypto bubble which ended abruptly last January.
You read it here first, though: we are now moving from crypto winter into crypto weirder.
In fairness, the Ethereum community has long been home to the starry-eyed idealists, utopians, and … let’s diplomatically call them “original thinkers” … of the blockchain world. Eyebrow-raising proposals are nothing new. At the same time, Ethereum’s programmability also attracts many hard-headed money people increasingly fascinated by the prospects and potential profits of “DeFi,” decentralized finance.
DeFi, to oversimplify, incorporates and transcends the ICO craze of 2017-18 (most of which were Ethereum tokens) into decentralized platforms for loans, currency stabilization, insurance, clearinghouses, even derivatives, and much more.
