Exploring transformation of value in the digital age

By Michael J. Casey, Chief Content Officer

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I feel grateful to OpenAI. With the past week’s release of its ChatGPT project, the artificial intelligence lab gave the tech and crypto world something else to obsess over besides Sam Bankman-Fried’s tour of madness. In this week’s column I argue that this radical new automated information source could single-handedly lay the foundation for the Web3 economy. 

In this week’s “Money Reimagined” podcast my co-host Sheila Warren and I chat with CoinDesk’s own Ben Schiller, managing editor of Consensus Magazine (and editor of this newsletter), about this week’s release of our ninth annual Most Influential List. It offered an interesting lens to view what has perhaps been the wildest year in crypto history.  Have a listen after you read the newsletter. 

Launched in September 2017, KuCoin is a global cryptocurrency exchange with its operational headquarters in Seychelles. As a user-oriented platform with focus on inclusiveness and community action reach, it offers over 700 digital assets, and currently provides spot trading, margin trading, P2P fiat trading, futures trading, staking, and lending to its 20 million users in 207 countries and regions.

In 2022, KuCoin raised over $150 million in investments through a pre-Series B round, bringing total investments to $170 million with Round A combined, at a total valuation of $10 billion. KuCoin is currently one of the top 5 crypto exchanges according to CoinMarketCap. Forbes also named KuCoin one of the Best Crypto Exchanges in 2021. In 2022, The Ascent named KuCoin the Best Crypto App for enthusiasts.

(GetttyImages)

It has been a long time since a software release has consumed the tech community as much as ChatGPT, the latest offering from OpenAI, the AI startup founded by Elon Musk.

This chatbot, trained on massive pools of data and now able to answer any query you might have, gained more than a million users in less than a week. Post after post on Twitter revealed the inanimate interface crafting eloquent, believable prose on whatever topic was asked of it. 

ChatGPT is far from perfect. But Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson said those imperfections won’t hinder the disruption this technology poses to a key part of the internet: search. 

In an enthused video post, Thompson argued the chatbot would resolve most people’s general questions about the world, such that it will quickly overtake Alphabet’s Google algorithm. Rather than “Googling” something and waiting for a variety of ad-supported answers to come back, people will simply ask a chatbot and get an immediate answer.

It’s hard to overstate how transformative that idea is. The entire Web2 economy, with its hierarchy of websites, from most trafficked to least, is built on a foundation of search. 

From Google’s algorithm was built Web2’s core business model: the sale of user data to programmatic advertisers who pay fees structured on a commodity-like measure of “page views,” “uniques” and “sessions.” And all of that, conceivably, could go away. 

What does this mean for crypto? Well, I think we may have just stumbled on the catalyst to take the digital economy into the decentralized Web3 era, creating new monetizable opportunities for non-fungible tokens (NFT), stablecoin payment systems and metaverse projects. 

The vista opened by OpenAI suggests that our Web3 future might not be dependent on the appeal of Web3 technologies per se, but by a force external to them, one that disrupts the core Web2 economy and leaves the world open to an alternative. 

If the Web2 advertising model is about to get overturned, how will brands and media companies reach their customers and audiences to generate revenue? Maybe with NFTs.

Off the Charts: Bitcoin No Longer Dominating the Bear

Smart folks are noting that a key measure of bitcoin’s proportional size within the wider crypto marketplace is performing in unexpected ways. In the past, when bitcoin’s price has fallen along with other tokens such as ether, the measure known as bitcoin dominance has typically risen as nonbitcoin assets fell proportionately more than the largest and oldest cryptocurrency. That pattern has given bitcoin a kind of safe haven status within the crypto asset universe. 

But, as this chart prepared by my colleague Sage D. Young shows, that’s not happening this time. The year-long crypto bear market, for which bitcoin’s own price is a useful barometer, has done nothing to lift bitcoin dominance off the lows it dropped to during the bull run last year. 

One of those smart observers is Noelle Acheson, formerly the head of research at Genesis Trading and, before that, at CoinDesk. Acheson wrote in her Crypto Is Macro Now newsletter, republished on CoinDesk, that the slump is partly explained by continued speculation in nonbitcoin assets. She noted that over the past month, litecoin (LTC) was up over 25%, OKX’s token OKB was up more than 36%, and that the Binance ecosystem wallet’s token TWT was up over 110%. 

Far from worrying that crypto remains consumed by bubble-like behavior, Acheson saw positive signals in this speculative activity. “Bitcoin is still the anchor asset, by a wide margin, but the volatility of its protagonism is weakening,” she wrote. “This is a sign of a maturing asset class. That this should become apparent during one of the industry’s darkest times is cause for hope.”

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The Conversation: Kid Gloves Coming off?

After much will-he-won’t-he speculation, Sam Bankman-Fried’s window for avoiding testifying at congressional hearings into the collapse of his crypto exchange, FTX, appeared to close on Wednesday. Leaders of the Senate Banking committee and House Financial Services Committee made it clear that the “voluntary” nature of their request for Bankman-Fried’s attendance next week was in name only

The stern warnings against non-appearance came a week after the chief of the House committee, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), came under attack for what some in the crypto community saw as an excessively soft approach toward the man behind the most consequential failure in crypto history. This is the tweet that set them off:

On Wednesday, CNBC reported Waters did not intend to subpoena Bankman-Fried. But later that evening, just before news of the Senate committee’s demands, Waters angrily fired back, describing the CNBC report as “lies” and stating that a subpoena was “definitely on the table.”

The former FTX CEO will not find Washington, D.C., to be the welcoming place it was in December 2021, when all that seemed to matter was the funky way he tied his shoelaces. 

Relevant Reads: Most Influential 2022

There has not been a year in crypto history like 2022. Accordingly, this year-end’s Most Influential List, the ninth that CoinDesk has pulled together, is a doozy, filled with a cast of heroes and villains. You can find the full set of 50 here. Below I offer a sample of the stories written about some of those on the top 15 list. 

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