The crypto renaissance is finally here, March 3–17

Editor’s note

After taking a bit of a break and skipping a week for the newsletter, I’ve returned with the feeling that something big is brewing for the crypto space.

To people who follow me on Twitter or here, it is probably no secret that I believe the fate of the crypto market is strongly tied to that of the tech sector and stock market as a whole. After showing really strong signs of a pending crash, it seems that markets are well on their way to a recovery. If you look at the S&P 500, it’s actually been making new highs last week. The actual source of the uncertainty was the Nasdaq 100, the tech-heavy index, which is now making a solid recovery as well.

A favorable stock market environment is key to maintaining the crypto bull run. We obviously don’t know how long all this will last, but it seems that the initial panic subsided and likely won’t return for at least a month or two. As always, not financial advice and I may very well be wrong.

The stock market recovery has of course been reflected in the crypto markets as well. Over these past few weeks, I’ve realized just how far crypto has come in popular perception. NFTs have a lot to do with that reputation improvement, although I can’t imagine it being the only demand driver like with 2017 ICOs.

Technology advances are setting us up nicely for an explosive rest of the year. Between Ethereum layer-two, Polkadot’s parachains and Cosmos’s Stargate all coming online now or in the near future, we should have plenty of bandwidth to let developers build exciting new crypto primitives.

We’re still in very, very early stages of DeFi and crypto adoption. All we’ve seen so far is a lot of Ponzi games with maybe a few small nuggets of something real. The Ponzi games have definitely served well to develop the infrastructure and attract a lot of money, but I’m mostly excited about what’s to come. My hope is that we’re not far off from that promise.