19 November 2022: Over the past year, the bull market came to an end and the cryptoeconomy has entered the cold depths of a long recession. Since this downturn, a large number of projects have failed - notoriously led by the complete collapse of centralized exchanges. The media has been adamently jumping all over the FTX fallout.

First off, SBF and those running FTX (and their affiliated companies) are nothing short of calculated criminals. Those that had and lost funds on FTX have been devasted - $10 billion lost. Does this set back the entire cryptoeconomy years? Undoubtedly - yes.

However, the collapse of FTX, Celsius, and other custodial exchanges is arguably a major positive for the entire space over the long term. Let me explain.

Getting Back to Our Roots

Ultimately, FTX and other CeFi companies represented the penetration of traditional financial business models into the cryptoeconomy. Did this help to push adoption over the last couple of years? Yes. But this resulted in millions losing funds because the values of the crypto space were forgotten - privacy, decentralization, and permissionless finance.

This was the entire motivation behind Bitcoin to begin with - to separate a currency from not only nation states, but the entire global financial system. Creating checks and balances so that abuse in the traditional system could at least be mitigated. This is because if people lose trust in this sytem, they have a legitimate alternative in the global crypto financial system to fall back on.

However, this only works if the values and vision of this system see the adoption. FTX did not represent this. None of CeFi does. The good news? Major blue chip DeFi protocols have functioned through repeated crisis over the past year without so much as a scratch. Decentralized applications do not care about FTX. Loans of Aave are secured by code, not by third party trust.

With these core systems still functioning at the heart of the cryto ecosystem, all that is needed is further adoption. The hope is that the collapse of FTX continues to push individuals into DeFi and away from yield farming on trusted custodians.

I joined the crypto space because I believed that permissionless finance and decentralization are the way towards a more prosperous civilization. I still believe this is true today.

A Personal Note

I have been extremely busy over the past several months making my own contributions within the space. This has materialized most prominently through my role with LandVault (world's largest metaverse builder) and CryptoEQ (crypto market research). Due to my constraints with content bandwidth, I have a vision for RekTimes that I have been planning and working on in the background. The mission remains the same - to accelerate the adoption of the cryptoeconomy.

Expect a more formal return in 2023. In the meantime, follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn to keep up with what I am doing in the space. I will routinely try to write as I find time. Cheers!