Stoics used to say something along the lines: "Prepare for the worst, hope for the best and accept what you must".
As you can tell by my recent public bear posts, I've always been more of a "prepare for the worst" kinda a guy 🤣. I have been thinking a lot about what the worst-case scenario could be and the right strategy to adopt if it were to come to pass.
Everybody and their mother is posting #NotYourKeysNotYourCoins and there appears to be a consensus forming in the industry that the way out of this mess is to focus on actually decentralised products & services that rely on immutable code, rather than the whims of sociopaths like SBF. CZ rightfully said, "DeFi is the end game". From a product perspective, that is exactly where we are and always will be positioned.
Our current focus is and has been on DeFi blue chip integrations. Ironically, there is a good chance that recent events concerning centralised industry players will cause more people to look for and adopt the solutions we aim to provide.
Back to the worst-case scenario and its potential ramifications. The thing that keeps me up at night the most by far is the looming regulation of web3 & DeFi, to the point that it would be all but impossible to use DeFi in the US & EU regions. Try explaining to your grandmother what the difference is between CeFi & DeFi / web3 and you’ll realise what we are up against. What happens to crypto in this scenario? As painful as that would be, there's some solace in the fact that there are far more people outside of the US & EU than inside it. Asian, African, in particular, South American citizens know the pain of ever-decreasing purchasing power due to the hyperinflation of fiat currencies.
There is already considerable familiarity with crypto in these regions and far less appetite to over-regulate crypto. Vitalik roams the street of Buenos Aires and is treated like a rockstar. He has spoken to leaders on both sides of the aisle and unlike in the US & EU, those talks have been received with a sense of welcome and excitement, instead of hostility and fear. I feel that Crypto would continue to thrive in those parts of the world. To be clear, I don't think this worst-case scenario will come to pass, but it is important to always be prepared for the worst.
What has a higher chance of happening, is the passing of draconian regulation that declares anything and everything producing a yield as a security.
I am just thinking out loud and not committing to anything with the following. A possible solution could be writing a smart contract that receives all the fees generated from user transactions, then on predetermined intervals (eg every week), uses the collected funds to purchase tokens on the open market and subsequently airdrops those tokens back to the addresses it purchased tokens from. These are just the types of creative ideas we would need to employ to handle that particular scenario.
The next obstacle to overcome would be, what I believe will be, the impending crypto ice age. By that, I mean a sustained bear market where the crypto space becomes a barren wasteland, where nobody cares about the crypto industry and the innovation therein. This seems to happen during every bear cycle and poses two problems to solve.
How do we make sure we grow and ensure we have a sufficient runway for development? We have had much internal discussion about this. I can't go into the details right now, but we came up with a potential solution where we have a defacto "infinite runaway". As for growth, I have been talking about a content marketing plan for a while and there is a lot of work being put in behind the scenes on this front. The key here will be to generate content that appeals to the few people who stick through the winter. I should note that the word few is in relative terms, but plenty in absolute numbers. Those of us who are around by the end of it will have earned the title crypto natives & degens. These are the people who understand and believe in the core crypto ideals as postulated by our founding fathers, the Cypherpunks. The bear market tends to flush out all the noise, making it much easier to reach them.
Crypto remains to be the best tool for promoting and protecting freedom in the world and as long as that's the case, there is nothing else worth working on. We'll never stop building, no matter how cold the ice age gets.
Check out updated site https://sonsofcrypto.com/
Follow https://twitter.com/sonsofcryptolab
Join https://t.me/socweb3
Get NFT https://opensea.io/collection/web3wallet-nft