The World Economic Forum (WEF) is predicting a more disciplined and integral future for crypto after a difficult 2022.
A blog post published on the forum’s website notes that cryptography and blockchains will continue to be integral parts of the modern economic toolkit despite the great harm these tools may have caused when wielded by the wrong people.
This is despite the loss of trust following numerous losses experienced throughout 2022.
“Millions of consumers and businesses lost money, and perhaps more damaging for a nascent industry and technology, the fundamental trust in the promise of crypto-finance, which was supposed to be a correction to many of the misdeeds that gave rise to the 2008 financial crisis, is waning,” the post said.
However the prediction is that the misdeeds from 2022 will put to bed an era of crypto speculation and way to responsible, always-on internet finance.
“Just as it took the dot-com bubble bursting in the early 2000s to hand over the future of the internet to more durable companies, business models and use cases, perhaps in 2022, marks a handover of crypto technology and blockchain infrastructure to steadier hands.”
Nonetheless, crypto regulation has been called upon to play a bigger role in protecting consumers and the industry.
“Policymakers who have been sounding an alarm about cryptos’ excessive risks, while failing to create sensible regulations, have been vindicated by not one, but multiple large-scale failures,” said the post.
It adds that those countries that enable responsible competition will shape the future.
“History is riddled with examples of otherwise good or neutral technologies being co-opted by bad actors and those ever-present human follies of greed, nescience, risks of opportunity or outright criminality. All of these are amplified in emerging, lightly regulated sectors and accelerated by technology.”
According to the author, no sector is risk-free, especially not one involving money even though crypto is much better at punishing the errant at speed, giving bad actors few places to hide.
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