Crypto is changing our financial literacy (for the better)
Crypto is democratising finance and it’s a beautiful thing to see.
I got really into crypto back in 2017. Bitcoin was $998.33 and Ethereum was $8.37 and no, I didn’t buy enough. But I loved it. I loved getting lost in the threads and Crypto Twitter becoming a thing. It made me feel like a young hacker kid using dial-up modems and writing command lines to access information. I could see this stuff was going to be big.
Crypto showed me that I was living in a world where anyone could play the financial game. Newcomers were accessing it and learning how to use it pretty fast. The best part? This game was very democratic. Morgan Stanley traders and kids were playing. Even more exciting was seeing these kids building algorithmic trading bots just so they could make more ETH to play more of the game. I watched people write a Solidity Smart Contract that could ‘BOT’ the next big NFT drop so they could flip it for millions. It really is a beautiful thing.
This game was very democratic.
Crypto rose fast, creating lots of winners and losers. The playing field is pretty even. But while playing, people made and lost lots of money. And so they were forced to learn how to do things properly. Figuring out the cheat codes, so to speak. They studied price action and supply and demand theory, all to make more BTC or ETH so they could play the next game - farming or NFTs. Unlike stock trading, the barrier to entry was low and inclusive. Along with picking up a new skill comes an understanding of financial services at a level many wouldn't have otherwise reached. Surely other financial services will become more accessible as a result.
Crypto is making people more sophisticated with money and finance. It’s forcing us to learn the language of money. A lot of people in the communities discuss this regularly - why weren’t they taught these basic financial skills at school? Dealing with money is one of the biggest things in your life next to eating, sleeping and socialising. These struggling crypto pioneers created a wealth of knowledge and resources which are free and accessible on the internet. The successful ones really seem to want to help others learn this financial language rather than hoard all the knowledge themselves.
It’s forcing us to learn the language of money.
I read about a beautiful use for NFTs on Twitter the other day - democratising the trust fund. Adam Blumberg from Interaxis minted an NFT with a picture of his daughter. He put the equivalent of her piggy bank and tooth fairy money into $OHM, staked it, put the $sOHM into the NFT and locked it for a year. Once a year, when they count her piggy bank, they’ll do it again. They’ll add a picture of her to the NFT every year. Hacking the crypto world to build a trust fund. Beautiful.
Don’t underestimate any project or person in this space. Kids in bedrooms playing games are spinning up working DeFi protocols with 100 lines of code whilst their parents are still doing their washing. They’re building using ETH or Solana and their protocols can process more transactions per second than most of the largest financial institutions. And yes, the institutions are coming. This is going to be very healthy for the whole ecosystem. But don’t underestimate the small project. Uniswap, one of the largest decentralised exchanges, only has 39 employees - yet they have $6.4 billion in USD value locked up in their protocol. Mind blown!
Crypto is forcing us to become more financially literate and giving us the power to take our finances into our own hands. I can’t wait to see how far it goes.
If you’re keen on crypto conversation, be sure to check out our thoughts on the Blockchain Insider podcast.