Can’t stop, won’t stop. If you are a bitcoin believer, and ethereum enthusiast, or just someone who was into NFTs for the art, we have good news: Startups and tech companies alike are not backing down from their prediction of a decentralized future.
TechCrunch has long covered blockchain-based technologies, with our coverage stretching back more than a decade. Since those humble beginnings we’ve seen booms and busts. Most recently we saw the 2021-era bubble push asset trading to such heights that Coinbase made it rain gold from the skies for a period. Since then, however, things have sobered up more than a little.
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And while there are some pieces of good news to chew on — crypto theft is trending down! — there are other issues ahead of crypto startups and believers that will have to be sorted out:
- Binance is under harsh censure in the United States and other regions for behavior that even users might balk at. To see the largest crypto exchange in the world by volume under such pressure is hardly bullish, even if it may be fair.
- Coinbase is tangling with domestic regulatory bodies to try and sort out what is a security, what is not a security, and whether or not crypto firms should be given a tailored and more lenient set of regulations while the current government is hellbent on saying that the existing rules are the rules, case closed.
- There is some optimism that the Coinbase-SEC wrangling will lead to industry-supported regulation, though hoping that the U.S. government can do something quickly is always a dicey bet.
- And of course, there is an AI story to crypto as well, with some parties expecting the two to share quite a lot of surface area.
Don’t let the bad news bring you down too far. There are still startups out there building what they consider to be the future of value and value transference on blockchains of all shapes and sizes. And TechCrunch+ is going to cover them all.
As an aside, we’re hosting a fintech stage at Disrupt this year. Be there, or be square.
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