Next year will be a big year for building in “tech crypto.” While the investment side of crypto (aka “money crypto”) struggles to repair grotesque violations of trust in centralized finance (CeFi), tech crypto must focus even more intently on improving user safety on-chain. This issue needs to be addressed now more than ever – and thankfully the work has already started. Self-custody and peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions enabled by blockchain is perhaps what crypto is all about. Any work to improve this is a positive trend that will have profoundly beneficial and lasting impacts across the crypto ecosystem. The lesson to take away from FTX and other CeFi debacles is not just that “this digital asset investment stuff should have been regulated … yesterday.” Instead, it’s that disintermediating transactions using software on global peer-to-peer networks could go a long way to avoid these sorts of failures. In other words, decentralized finance (DeFi) might fix this. The problem with that argument, of course, is that DeFi’s risk profile looks very different from that of CeFi. For middleman-less finance to take off, protocols must be not only useful but safe. DeFi only “fixes” things if its risk profile is low enough for everyday people to feel safe enough to actually use it.
Full opinion : 2023 Should Be the Year of On-Chain User Security.
