Before you accuse me of being alarmist, crypto is not dead, withthe rumours of a crypto Armageddon being vastly exaggerated. I have taken the provocative title from the cheeky advertisement that Coinbase, the world’s largest crypto company, ran earlier this year in the Superbowl proclaiming ‘Crypto is dead, long live Blockchain’. Little did they know that a few short weeks later, they and other crypto companies would be fighting for their lives, as they lay off their people and withdrew offer letters. The crypto market sank to a third of its peak value, and some major players halted Bitcoin withdrawal as an emergency liquidity measure. These crashes brought out the skeptics in full force, and the same tech pundits who were heralding the emergence of crypto, blockchain, and Web3 as the second coming, started muttering about their impending deaths. In my view, neither is crypto dead, nor does it herald the eclipse of the fundamental technology behind it, the Blockchain.

Before I explain why blockchain is as strong as ever, let us turn briefly to the crashing house of crypto. A lot of pundits explain the crash due to the overall geopolitical and economic conditions – the grinding war, soaring inflation, supply chain and labour disruptions and the cost-of-living crisis. However, what baffles people here is that these are exactly the sort of disruptions that crypto, especially Bitcoin, was supposed to be a hedge against. Much like gold, Bitcoin was what you bought when real-world countries and economies were in trouble. Theoretically, Bitcoin and crypto should have gone up, or at least stayed largely consistent to save the day. What is interesting is that the big crash started not because of the economic or political uncertainty, but because of another oft-happening real-world financial phenomena: the presence of fraudsters and hucksters. Terra Luna, a so-called stable coin, which was 3% of the total market, turned out to be built on a foundation of hype and collapsed spectacularly to zero. This set off a confidence crisis in the crypto world, and the bad economy only fed that fire.

This kind of thing is not a new phenomenon. It is not very long back in 2000, when the Internet bubble resoundingly burst, with hyped companies like eToys and Webvan turning belly-up, taking the whole dot-com industry down with them. But these companies were not the Internet. Not only did Internet businesses survive, but today they rule the world as social networks, mapping platforms, e-commerce and mobile payments run our economies and our very lives. As Maria Bustillos put it in the New York Times, “Crypto is just one aspect of the larger blockchain universe…,and its skeptics and fans alike must learn to see it as a technological experiment, instead of just a blatant scam or a speculative path to riches.”Eight years later, the big banks collapsed taken down by exotic mathematical instruments like collatrised debt obligations, or CDOs, dreamt up by greed-fueled bankers living in their own parallel world. The 2008 crash was projected to be in the region of $10trn, the current crypto meltdown is a fifth of that. Post this Wall Street bloodbath, many banks did not survive, but banking certainly did. So will be the case with crypto and its foundational technology, the blockchain. There were nearly 20,000 crypto coins, and only few of them will, and deserve to, survive after this brutal culling. “The crypto market is wildly volatile not because of cryptocurrency’s underlying technology”, says Bustillo, “but because of the uneasy and often dangerously unstable junction between emerging technologies and regular money”.

Even as the bright arc lights focus on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, Blockchain has been working away to solve problems in the less glamorous world of supply chains, financial services, large enterprises, and energy.They are being harnessed to untangle complex supply chains by large shipping companies and retailers. Blockchain based solutions are trying to make remittances less painful and expensive for itinerant labour, sending their precious savings back to their families. Blockchains are being experimented with to authenticate educational and other qualifications and make them less cumbersome to store and share, thus making education loans more affordable. Blockchain-based local energy grids are attempting to bring cheap energy to underserved areas. Governments are experimenting using Blockchain based technologies for secure identity systems. They are being used to keep tamper and fraud proof records of transactions. The decentralized nature of blockchains is being harnessed to build distributed business models like Helium, ‘a people’s Wi-Fi’ -not owned by a single powerful telecom company but shared across a collective. Blockchains are striving to reward online art and creativity with NFTs, powering parallel, though yet unproven, worlds like the metaverse, and providing the foundations of a ‘creator economy’.

A series of earthquakes seem to be shaking the crypto-world, and some of its largest structures seem to be collapsing. However, this is not the end of the world – it is just the tectonic plates of its infrastructure slipping and sliding over one another, as they strive to release the energies of creation from the system. Blockchain and crypto continue to live on.