Our Take on 5 Money Themes to Watch in 2022

On January 3rd, 2022, the Chief Content Officer of CoinDesk, Mr. Michael Casey, updated his view on various developments coming in 2022 in this article: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2021/12/31/5-money-themes-to-watch-in-2022/

Below are the headings from the original article with our feedback on each section.

Who will issue our money in the digital future?

Who issues your money today? The government does, but in the future will there be others that are issuing money? It sounds outlandish, but the reality is that in the past companies and local governments have both issued their own money — Disney Dollars are a prominent example of a self-issued currency.

This question is going to become more front of mind this year as significant events like the Winter Olympics rollout of the Chinese Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) the Digital Currency for Electronic Payments (DCEP) in February and the Bank of Jamaica’s CBDC rollout in the first quarter of the year. Is it possible that either of these new digital currencies will catch on in any of the neighboring countries?

The policy discussion will intensify

We have all been neck deep in the regulatory frameworks getting erected around the industry for the last few years, it would have been kind of hard to miss. The lack of a specific set of globally-accepted regulations has significantly hindered the growth and acceptance of these distributed technologies, and has driven successful businesses out of markets. Uncertainty makes insurance hard to get, makes investor’s pockets dry up, and makes talent hard to secure.

Will the US Security & Exchange Commission publish a position paper that will clarify its regulatory position and thinking to other countries? Will the legislation in various countries finally enact laws that protect the consumer from bad actors while not stifling innovation? Will the incorporation of more cryptocurrency touchpoints in traditional finance increase their acceptability — ETFs, baskets and futures?

Ethereum 2.0

What if Ethereum never transitioned to the POS Eth 2.0? Would it truly stifle anything — or are there enough EVM Layer 2 chains and other options that Ethereum doesn’t need to upgrade? Will DeFi and NFTs bring the masses to other chains? Vitalik himself seems to be setting up for a religious war publishing a piece where he shares his disdain for cross chain applications.

But does his opinion matter as much as it did 5 years ago? Has the creation eclipsed the creator? Has the ecosystem grown so much that the Ethereum Foundation and its members no longer hold control of the ecosystem? What if Ethereum ends up being Friendster, a good attempt that lost out to a better implementation?

Crypto’s environmental challenges/opportunities

Web3 sustainability revolves around how to minimize the collective draw required to power these decentralized technologies. More efficient computers, more efficient networks, more capable batteries, and green power generation will help to make this wave of tech evolution more sustainable, however, at the same time the deployment of sustainable power relied on Web3, like the blockchain command and control of a solar or wind array, and the accounting for the distribution and consumption of power in the system could be hosted on the same blockchain. Further the billing for and payment could also be hosted on the same blockchain. The deployment to support one activity in essence created the infrastructure for the rest.

Web 3

Web3 is here to stay — distributed technologies have been maturing since the early 2000’s and have spawned a series of improvements that will be the basis of the decentralized Internet. What is Web3? Put simply, it is the Internet where the compute and storage is at the edge of the network, supported and hosted by decentralized technologies and cryptographic consensus. Peer-to-Peer protocols, distributed synchronized storage, cloud computing, smartphones and the communications networks that they ride have brought us the first glimpse of what Web3 will look like. Everest is making Web3 more accessible to everyone, and we know it’s here to stay.