above: Whale Shark and Punk 6529 showing up as avatars for Fireside chat moderated by Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly Capital

A taking of the cultural pulse of the crypto community from artists to comedians to meet ups and beyond.

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What bear market? On seeing the amount of money that sponsors, exhibitors and attendees splashed at Token2049 in Singapore last week, one could be forgiven for thinking that all is right in the crypto space. 

Still, the current crypto winter dominated discussion. Panelists were introspective, sharing their views on what needs to happen now to smooth out kinks in web3 infrastructure, provide more stability and confidence and remove the clunkiness that’s preventing greater adoption. 

“There's a sense of inevitability that we're in the right space,” said Mike Novogratz, chief executive officer of Galaxy Digital. “Crypto will take off again the moment the Fed flinches. Bitcoin will, at least, and it will drag the rest of crypto up with it. But it's not really going to take off in a sustainable way until we get web3 projects that are used by masses and that's coming in 18 months, two years. It's coming. I think you're going to see a lot of blockchain uses. NFTs will lead the crypto revolution in lots of ways.”

“Traditional finance is going to die”

— Eric Wall

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, and how they could evolve was a hot topic. The failure of so many hyped profile picture, or PFP, projects was blamed on their speculative nature, the lack of meaningful utility and long-term community building. 

Aleksander Larsen, whose much lauded Axie Infinity didn’t live up to its promise of a Play-to -Earn revolution, said, “after the release of the token, you get a different type of community that wants to come in and speculate. And that's totally fine if you can turn those users from speculators into the real community. But if you're not careful, and you grow too fast, suddenly the speculators become the educators, and that's a massive problem. I think that's really a unique observation that we have.”

Showing up on screen as his PFP, Punk 6529 said, “You should think about NFT's as being at the level of maturity of the crypto industry in 2012-2013.”

In other sessions, the innovation of soulbound tokens – which can be used to verify identity, work history or medical records – were touted as a way to potentially avoid the speculative trend by locking communities into a longer relationship with a brand or game.

Games and NFTs were acknowledged as the easiest way to onboard the next generation of users to the web3 space. The friction between traditional finance and defi, and whether regulators want to see the two coexist, was seen as a barrier to mass adoption, regardless of technological innovation in the blockchain space. 

“Traditional finance is going to die,” said Eric Wall, a researcher and former chief investment officer at Scandinavian cryptocurrency hedge fund Arcane Assets.

“During the last five years, we've had more explosive advancements in applied cryptography from the crypto space,” he said. “None of that has come from the traditional finance industry. They don't even know how to reconcile their trades at the end of the day without Excel spreadsheets. Defi is the future. We're not going to go over there to optimize their systems. They’re going to have to come to us.”