Recap: Findora at Crypto Bahamas
On behalf of Findora, I attended Crypto Bahamas, which took place from April 26–29th. The exclusive summit featured collaboration and networking among some of the leading players in the crypto and traditional financial industry.
To me, Crypto Bahamas was a place to connect and reconnect with friends, former colleagues, and business partners that I have gotten to know over the past 9 years working full-time in crypto, while also meeting new people in the growing space.
A few key takeaways from Crypto Bahamas:
- We’ve barely seen the tip of the iceberg for institutional adoption of crypto
A $2T market cap is still small in comparison to the markets of other asset classes. This may seem obvious to some in-the-know, but most people think it’s too late to get into crypto either as a passive investor or as a career. I heard this same argument in 2014, 2018, and so on… Institutional adoption will usher in a new tidal wave of people entering the crypto space for the first time. The infrastructure (both technical and regulatory) is still being built to support this surge. When it comes, it will be a pressure test for everyone.
2. The talent pool in crypto is growing to exciting new heights
In 2015, crypto meetups were still hyper local, hosted in dark office spaces, with pizza boxes and 2L bottles of your favorite sugar water. The people attending them were mostly part-time devs working on evening / weekend side projects. The few fortunate enough to have found full-time work in crypto were mostly low-level C++ engineers, physics dropouts, and the occasional theoretical mathematician. Now, people are publicly leaving their cushy jobs at MAANG Web2 companies and diving head first into crypto. The industry needs this in order to spin out of the dizzying cycle of crypto people building crypto things for crypto people. Also, for all the parents out there, so they no longer have to tell people their kids work at bitcoin.
3. ZKP privacy is growing in importance but privacy is still full of FUD
It has become clear that ZKP privacy is growing in importance, although privacy is still very misunderstood with a ton of FUD. People still tend to associate privacy in crypto with illicit use cases of shadowy hackers stealing crypto and using mixers to hide their trail while they make off with the loot. Even though this represents a tiny proportion of actual privacy usage in crypto, it still grabs all the headlines in crypto media. I often try to clarify this misunderstanding by highlighting the difference between secrecy and privacy. Secrecy being a state in which someone doesn’t want anyone to know what they’re doing. Privacy being a state in which someone doesn’t want everyone to know what they’re doing. The difference seems subtle, but it is profound. Secrecy is reckless and often leads to illicit use cases. Privacy is something that already exists in traditional finance, and should become prevalent in the crypto industry too. Most people I talked with at Crypto Bahamas agreed with this conjecture, which shifted the conversations into how we can make privacy better. That’s when I explain Findora’s sensible, auditable, practical approach to plug-and-play privacy and why it matters to help grow crypto into the mainstream.
I always leave crypto conferences deeply encouraged by all the energy, talent and passion that exists in the space for building better ways of doing older things. Crypto Bahamas fulfilled that sentiment.
