How the crypto industry swings back and forth between assets and infrastructure

Runaway Comments: Initially, it was Bitcoin. With the emergence of Bitcoin, a new industry was born. encryption field. Blockchain world. Bitcoin has spawned thousands of new assets, and new forms of interacting with them.

Bitcoin achieves both of these things. It creates a new form of money: one that requires neither a central bank nor collateral. It can be provably scarce and is governed only by the code and the people who write and run that code.

It also creates new ownership and transaction models. This new model does not require third parties or middlemen. This means that anyone has direct control over their assets and can transfer them in a purely peer-to-peer fashion. A new form of currency. A new ownership model.

Financial Times: The EU's proposed encryption regulations will divide the encryption industry into three different forms: On May 18, according to the British "Financial Times", the EU's proposed encryption regulations "Encrypted Assets EU Market Law" (EU Markets in Crypto- Assets Act) will divide the industry into three different forms, namely:

1. NFT (or virtual tool)

2. Stablecoin, whose value needs to be linked to real-world assets

3. Digital currencies always represent the fixed exchange rate of hard currency

Among them, digital currency can only be issued by licensed banks or financial technology companies, and Stablecoin issuers must meet the minimum level of reserve requirements. It is understood that the European Union is the first international organization to propose a specific encryption regulatory framework, but some member states have enacted special legislation for tokens and cryptocurrencies, but there is no consensus on this at the multinational level. [2022/5/18 3:26:05]

The emergence of Bitcoin gave birth to a new industry. encryption field. Blockchain world. Bitcoin has spawned thousands of new assets, and new forms of interacting with them. While innovation in these two areas of assets and infrastructure often occurs together and often under the same banner, they should not be confused. New assets do not necessarily create new experiences of ownership and transaction. Likewise, new models of ownership and transactions do not always require new assets.

US Law Firm Files 11 Class Actions Against Crypto Industry: On April 3, law firm Roche Friedman filed 11 new class actions in the Southern District of New York. They are Binance, Civic, BProtocol, Status, Block.one, KayDex, Quantstamp, BiBox, TRON Foundation, KuCoin, HDR Global Trading and their relevant leaders, including Brendan Blumer, Dan Larimer, Vinny Lingham, the founder of Binance Changpeng Zhao (CZ). It is difficult to summarize 11 specific complaints, but the key issue is the nature of these tokens as securities and their availability for purchase by Americans. (theblockcrypto)[2020/4/5]

CoinDesk columnist Jill Carlson is the co-founder of the Open Money Initiative, a nonprofit research group that works to secure the right to a free and open financial system. She is also an investor in early-stage startup Slow Ventures.

Voice | US SEC Commissioner Peirce: SEC's slow progress in the regulation of the encryption industry has caused damage to the market: According to Cryptoslate, US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce shared her opinion at a recent event A view on the current state of the U.S. crypto industry and how the slow response from regulators has affected the industry. Pierce argued that the SEC’s lack of action has caused damage to the U.S. crypto market and said there are several ways to address the problem. The lack of "outsiders" on the committee could bring a wind of change to the agency, she said. However, recruiting for the U.S. government regulator has proven to be more difficult than it seems. She also said that both investors and the SEC need to balance their expectations. “If you ask for more leeway, you can’t blame the government,” she said at the event. In order to regulate it, the SEC first needs to agree on what cryptocurrencies are. When Pierce was asked if she thought of cryptocurrencies as an asset or a mechanism, she said she primarily sees it as a transaction mechanism. However, Pierce added that the store-of-value function of digital assets should not be overlooked. "I do think we're going to see technology change and they're going to be more of an asset to the internet," she said. [2019/9/28]

The fact that Bitcoin marks both the birth of a new asset and the invention of a new infrastructure has long confused people and led to confusion between the two. And now is the time to start noticing the difference between the two.

Voice | Ripple executives: Universities must provide courses related to the actual status quo of the encryption industry: According to Cointelegraph, Ripple’s director of social relations, Ken Weber, recently said in an interview that universities around the world must expand educational programs and provide courses related to the blockchain industry. Training courses related to the actual status of the digital asset industry. He cited a report that stated that the demand for software engineers with blockchain development skills has increased by 517% in the past year, but the demand is far greater than the supply. Although more than 40% of the world's top 50 universities offer at least one blockchain or crypto course, they are often closely tied to different disciplines such as law, engineering, mathematics, and business administration. To address this, he argues, universities must offer courses that are relevant to the actual state of the industry. Crypto companies should partner with the academic field to help form a professional workforce. [2019/8/25]

The industry, while seldom aware of it, has always oscillated between prioritizing the creation of new assets and prioritizing building infrastructure.

From 2013 to 2015, altcoins such as zcash, Monero, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, and Dogecoin appeared one after another. These are all representative of new assets. Basically, some of these new assets also provide new ways for users to interact with assets, as well as other new aspects: such as privacy and programmability. But there are also assets that have nothing but marketing. There are a lot of bags in the cryptocurrency space that you're not sure what to do with.

From 2015 to 2016, the industry learned its lesson that not all new assets are valuable, and much of the industry's interest shifted to building new infrastructure around old assets. A whole enterprise blockchain industry was born. Companies such as R3, Chain, Symbiont and Digital Asset have focused their efforts on reinventing traditional financial products such as stocks, bonds, derivatives and swaps.

These companies shy away from the challenge of creating new assets. However, they run into an even bigger problem of how to create new, peer-to-peer-based ownership and transaction models around today’s legacy asset classes that rely on rich, powerful, impenetrable third parties.

Tired of the hard work, investors and operators collectively turn their attention back to new assets. As we all know, 2017 and 2018 were the years of ICOs: Initial Coin Offerings. Tezos, Polkadot, 0x: Again, some of these new assets also bring fundamentally new experiences to their owners.

But many other projects—too many to list—fail to do that. They extract a lot of value in the form of unprecedented fundraising, but in most cases - even in the case of the network launching and issuing assets, they don't create much value. The corresponding consequence is what we call "crypto winter".

Then, over the past two years, we've seen the wind shift back again around innovation around infrastructure and the ownership and transaction experience. The rise of decentralized exchanges, the new race among wallet providers, the birth of blockchain-based lending protocols. All of this, similar to the enterprise app boom before it, is really more an experience of how we interact with assets than an attempt to create new ones.

This experiment in decentralized finance has proven to be quite effective in many ways. For the first time, people, although currently limited in number, will be able to execute two-way, purely digital transactions without having to rely on a centralized third party for custody, protection of their assets, or provision of liquidity. A major limitation of this new infrastructure is the fact that many assets compatible with it have so far failed to demonstrate fundamental, durable, long-term value.

Currently we can see such a cyclical and swinging pattern: innovate on crypto assets, find challenges, turn to develop blockchain infrastructure, hit roadblocks and return to crypto assets. Soon (maybe even sooner than I expect), we'll see the swing of interest from infrastructure back again to innovation around the assets themselves.

In fact, we can already see signs of this in the DeFi world. A good example is Uniswap (an infrastructure project) issuing tokens. The emerging community and governance tokens more generally represent a continued search-zce for ways to issue new decentralized assets with fundamental value. The resurgence of interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the huge attention some NFT tokens, mainly co-branded with artists, suggest that the market is once again swinging in an asset-centric direction. The resurgence of conversations about "initial state/currency issuance" and central bank digital currencies also represent possible directions for porting real-world value into digitally native blockchains. I also doubt that this exploration will bring market interest back to Bitcoin, one of the few cryptoassets that seems to have proven its worth.

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