There is a world outside of cryptocurrencies — although Sam Bankman-Fried and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao may not being see much of it in the months and years to come. Let’s say their careers are on HODL.
From the earliest stage of the crypto evolution the tribes parted, with the currency purists going one way and the less adventurous another way, seeing more of an opportunity in the platforms on which crypto was built — distributed ledger technologies, such as blockchain, and tokenisation, the digital representation of an asset.
Both tribes have advanced but it’s fair to say the mainstreaming of cryptocurrency is a work in progress — one which the defenestration of SBF and CZ has pushed back. (Although some would argue such a cataclysm may actually deliver a sharper focus on governance and the need to separate clearly conflicted operations like exchanges and custodians of assets.)
Regulators and national authorities (some more frontier economies aside) remain sceptical of pure, unbacked, unleashed crypto. But as the Bank of England’s Jon Cunliffe said in his final speech as the bank’s man for financial stability, isolation is not an option.
