Is cryptocurrency dead?

Is cryptocurrency dead?

 LONDON; Perhaps the chasm between crypto missionaries and their critics has never been worse.

On Wednesday, leading Silicon Valley venture capital group Anderson Horowitz described the “golden age” of cryptocurrency as a “great wave of global talent” that flooded the industry in the past. age

"That's why we decided to hit it off," said Chris Dixon, managing partner of the company.

On the same day, a booming investor made headlines that Bitcoin could drop from the current $30,000 to $8,000.

“Currently, bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies themselves are not considered reliable institutional investments,” Scott Maynard, chief investment officer at Guggenheim Partners, told Bloomberg News at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "It's really becoming a marketplace for Yahoo and the drinking community."

This is a big change from February of last year when Minerd told CNN's Julia Chatterley that he could see bitcoin trading around 40,000 yen and eventually rising to "$400,000 to $600,000."

Bitcoin hit a record high of $69,000 in November. It has since lost more than half its value as investors exited risky assets before interest rates rose.

Despite the incident, there were many panels about cryptocurrency and digital money in Davos this year, not to mention the famous Valley City and crypto-related merchants. But the system's loud sound wasted no time in calming the Web3 audience.

“Bitcoin may be called a currency, but it is not a currency,” Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the International Monetary Fund, said on the first day of the event. "This is not a fixed-value stock."

So where do we go from here?

It is easy to see the daily fluctuations of cryptocurrencies along with offshore projects like Terra and Luna entering a “death spiral” and philosophically rejecting blockchain technology. But corrupt loyalists say that despite the problems, corruption is far from over.

First, cryptocurrencies are facing their own branding challenges, according to some experts.

Marcus Ontario, an analyst at Digital Asset Brokerage Global Block, said the term cryptocurrency can be misleading.

“Ninety percent of cryptocurrencies are not trying to be currencies — they are trying to be the things behind these blockchain networks,” he said. "And I think it's only a matter of time before all companies integrate blockchain in some way."

Calls for closer standards have been growing, especially since the deaths of TerraUSD and its sister Luna Coin earlier this month. Many advocates prefer more vigilance, in part because it may help corruption get a better reputation. There are now an estimated 300 million cryptocurrency users, and Sotiriou says that number doubles each year — nearly twice the number of people who have historically adopted the internet.

“Although the sentiment is really bad at the moment and everything looks bleak and sad, the basic principles of cryptocurrency have not changed,” he says.

Davos Cargo

Here's Julia Horowitz, lead author of Beef the Bell, in a post from Davos, Switzerland, where she reports at the World Economic Forum.

Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Mikhail Fedorov has a message for tech giants SAP and Cloudflare: Get out of Russia now.

I spoke with Fedorov on the sidelines of the Davos summit, his first trip outside Ukraine since the Russian invasion three months ago. He was here on a mission to encourage business and government leaders to do more to help and met with META leaders from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

"Each of us can do better," he said.

About 500 technology companies have left Russia since President Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine on February 24, according to Fedorov's statistics. But it urged tech companies Cloudflare and SAP to continue operating in Russia, saying that it undermined the effectiveness of the "digital blockade".

“When a company operates in the Russian market, it invests in the Russian budget, which finances the Russian army,” Fedorov said. "It makes it possible to kill the Ukrainians."

Germany's SAP, which produces business software, said it plans to leave Russia in April. However, Fedorov said the company has slowed its exit and needs to move quickly.

I am sure that sooner or later they will leave Russia - but sooner or later, because people are being killed,” SAP said in a statement.

The cloud service provider said in a statement that it had "the smallest sales and marketing activity in Russia" and that it had "eliminated all users whose affiliations we had with approved entities." Has been identified. "

Fedorov stressed that the "digital blockade" is an important means of responding to Russia, as it could push the country back "twenty or thirty years", prompting some engineers and experts to leave the country. ۔

"We also want the Russian people to understand that something is wrong, people. They need to oppose the war."

Chinese officials signaled panic.

In an unusual move, the Chinese government held an emergency meeting with more than 100,000 people on Wednesday, according to state media. Agenda: Do whatever it takes to save the economy.

In an unexpected video conference, Premier Li Keqiang gave the worst-ever assessment of the state of the economy of Chinese leaders. My partner in the CNN business, Jesse Young, told me at the start of the epidemic that in some ways it was worse than 2020. He called on leaders across the country to tackle rising unemployment.

One step back: The world's second-largest economy, which previously claimed growth of 10% or more, is struggling with its own CoVID-19 protocol that has put millions of people in lockdown. Is.

Earlier this week, UBS cut its annual GDP growth to 3%. China says it expects about 5.5 percent growth this year.

Sustainable development is not just an economic priority. China's party leadership maintained its grip on power, partly through the development of engineering that lifted millions out of poverty. Leaders are particularly sensitive to the symptoms of social unrest that can result from a lack of economic prospects.

Earlier this month, Lee, the second most senior member of the Communist Party after President Xi Jinping, described the country's economic situation as "complex and dangerous." Despite these challenges, President Xi has redoubled his policy of avoiding Covid 19, saying the state will punish anyone who suspects it.