It's not easy to be a cryptocurrency these days. But, as they say, after the storm the sun will shine again. Sam Bankman, CEO of FTX and a key exponent of this market, wrote down the key uses of cryptocurrencies are explored and their expectations for the future are projected.
The use cases highlighted are 3:
1. PAYMENTS: In today's world, to make a payment it is necessary to pay in a commission (automatically deducted by a bank), to wait whole days for the confirmation of sending and / or receiving and, in the case of international transfers, you incur even higher costs, risks blocking of funds for investigations or - in the case of sending dollars for example - the impossibility of carrying out an operation.
Using a blockchain speeds up times, both at the execution level and by removing the wait for checks, as it is all on a public ledger. Note: this is true INDEPENDENTLY from the centralization of a chain, and here Sam focuses on the usefulness of Solana, which, as we often reiterate, is anything but decentralized.
2. SETTLEMENT: The settlement function is used whenever the execution of large-scale transactions is required, such as the purchase of a large amount of shares or bonds. In these cases, in traditional finance, one necessarily passes through a series of intermediaries: Sam gives the example NASDAQ -> PFOF # 2's clearing firm -> ATS -> PFOF # 1's clearing firm -> broker's clearing firm for purchasing a "simple" product such as a stock.
The blockchain cuts the need for these intermediaries (again for the reason of the previous point), greatly reducing costs, lowering times and, above all, removing the inherent risks in each intermediary.
This last aspect is frequently omitted, but it is an important improvement aspect: as in the striking case of GameStop at the beginning of 2021, the more layers of brokers and clearing firms are involved in an operation, the more likely it is that DECORRELATED problems will occur. FROM UNDERLYING.
Furthermore, by tokenizing assets just like shares on a blockchain, it is possible to further reduce the costs of a broker, since only the gas fees of that particular chain would be taken into account.
3. SOCIAL MEDIA: Finally, blockchain technology can allow social networks to finally become interoperable, bypassing the domain of a single actor who decides to exclude competitors from the content posted on their platforms. As if that weren't enough, decentralization has the natural consequence of protecting freedom of expression and allowing access even outside the censorship operated by some countries.
Bankman concludes that cryptocurrencies are only now starting to revolutionize some of these areas, and predicts that success depends heavily on REGULATION, NETWORK EFFECT and USER EXPERIENCE, which will happen in the next 3-7 years.
Law student, startupper, passionate about cinema, blockchain, metaverse and fitness.