Austin Vernon on crypto (from my email)

I think your column agrees with my mental model in that the actual crypto networks may not be regulated, but the on-ramps and off-ramps will be heavily regulated (and already are).

If you are an exporter being paid in crypto assets by a Nigerian importer, the obvious thing to do is hedge that crypto against your currency of choice. Because of the volatility, this is maybe most analogous to oil companies hedging oil sales. It is a common practice that most energy lenders provide as part of their menu.

If you tried to set up a service to do this without following the current regulations, I’m sure you’d end up in prison. Just like Coinbase or USDC is already regulated under current rules, hedging crypto against the dollar would easily fall under CFTC rules. Your bank that already provides a line of credit and knows your order book would be the one to offer the service.

I think this is a good outcome in that for those so inclined, the crypto networks provide high risk but low regulation pathways to do business. Everybody else that wants to straddle the dollar and crypto world to get some benefits of crypto will still use the same institutions that manage the massive amounts of regulation that exists in the dollar world.

Maybe the best way to look at the future of crypto, especially outside of bitcoin, is that it is the perfect open-source software ecosystem. Everything is easily interoperable, security is high, and there is a business model for paying developers. Linux and Unix never became consumer operating systems, but they underly every website you use, every popular phone operating system, and now both macOS and Windows. Crypto can do that for financial systems and other applications by providing the infrastructure for advanced (and regulated) consumer and enterprise apps to be built on. It is more like Marc Andreessen’s “software is eating the world” than crypto anarchy. The crypto-anarchists will always have Monero!

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