A prominent developer within decentralised finance has lamented the ‘rise and fall of crypto culture’.
Andre Cronje, a former technical adviser at the Fantom Foundation and founder of Yearn.finance, also said the cryptocurrency financial systems are being built by people with little knowledge of how monetary systems work.
“I wish I was older. I wish I was old enough to see the birth of monetary policy. I wish I could have seen the mistakes they had made, because I believe we are repeating them,” he wrote in a blog post entitled ‘The rise and fall of crypto culture’.
“I often feel that a lot of what is being built in crypto is being built by people that read a Wikipedia article on bonds, or seigniorage, or debt instruments and then thought to themselves, ‘they can do this better’.
“It’s something that happens often in coding: you find a fresh piece of code written by another organisation or developer, you quickly start finding faults – ‘this isn’t needed’, ‘this could have been done better’, ‘why did they do this? it’s pointless’ – and then starts the ‘I can do this better’.
“So you spend the next few days, weeks, even months re-engineering the code, then you hit your first wall, and you have to make some adjustments, then your second, then your third and so on, and eventually your code looks exactly like their code did, and you have that ‘oh, right, that’s why’ moment as you finally understand why it was what it was.
“Monetary policy is the same: understanding monetary supply, issuance, debt, bonds, seigniorage, debentures, commodities, securities, derivatives can’t be viewed in isolation. They exist for a reason. But crypto is the new generation, the generation of ‘we can do it better’.”
Cronje shut down his Twitter account last month.
Writing ‘Crypto is dead. Long live Crypto’, he bemoaned the culture surrounding cryptocurrency investments.
“I have long been vocal on my disdain of crypto culture, and my love for crypto ethos. Reading that might sound weird, but crypto ethos is concept like self-sovereign rights, self custody, self empowerment. Crypto culture is concepts like wealth, entitlement, enrichment, and ego,” he explained. “Crypto culture has strangled crypto ethos.
“A professor once told me ‘contracts are there for the bad times, not the good times’. Regulation, and legislation is the same. They are there for the bad times, when you most need it, not the good times, when it’s all honeymoon and champagne.
“I now more than ever see the need, or even necessity for regulation, not as a mechanism to prevent, but as a mechanism to protect. It’s like a child trying to stick their finger into an electric outlet: you stop them, before they can learn why they shouldn’t. One day they will understand, but not today.
“We are entering a new age, the current iteration will become the badlands, where unknown wallets lurk in the shadows, we will see the rise of a new blockchain economy, not one driven by greed, but instead driven by trust, not trustlessness.
“There is an irony in having come full circle, yet I find myself more excited than ever. I won’t step foot into the badlands again, but I’m vastly excited about this new future.”