During the House Financial Services Committee’s FTX hearings last month, Rep. Jesus Garcia (D-Ill.) described crypto as “an entire industry” that “thinks it's above the law,” and then said something that irked me even more than that unhelpful opening generalization.
Crypto companies “are making money using one thing: hype,” Garcia said. “And when the hype runs out, these businesses fail and ordinary investors, especially latecomers who are disproportionately low income, Black and Latino, lose.”
Now, it’s true that many people of color bought crypto in recent years and that, by extension, many have lost money on account of Celsius Network, FTX, Voyager Digital, et al. But there’s a subtext to Garcia’s comment – whether or not he consciously intended it – that patronizingly paints certain communities in the U.S. and elsewhere as ill-informed and vulnerable, denying them agency and blindly missing a bigger story of empowerment.
Take a look at hundreds of grassroots crypto projects led by Blacks and Latinos in the U.S., and at the many crypto-based business models arising in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and you will find large swaths of human beings from income-challenged, marginalized or oppressed communities seeking new ways to take charge of their lives.
There’s a reason why the top four positions in Chainalysis’ activity and purchasing power-weighted country ranking of per-capita crypto adoption are occupied by Vietnam, the Philippines, Ukraine and India and why the sixth-through-10th positions belong to, Pakistan, Brazil, Thailand, Russia and China. And according to a forthcoming report on “Black Experiences in Web3” from the Crypto Research and Design Lab (CRADL), there’s also a reason why the fifth position is occupied by the U.S., the only developed Western country in the list: It’s because of an outsized level of adoption among Black Americans.
Hint for Garcia: The common denominator across this top ten is not Sam Bankman-Fried. FTX’s Super Bowl ads featuring Larry David weren’t subliminally targeting rickshaw drivers in Vietnam, refugees in Ukraine or, for that matter, Black hospitality workers in the U.S. Millions of people worldwide got into this field because they saw a way around a legacy financial system that had kept them from executing on their own untapped potential.
Sure, these marginalized early adopters are still a minority in their communities. Cryptocurrencies are far from universally accepted. And the negative sentiment generated by the 2022 meltdown will slow growth. But the worldwide adoption trend among these groups is on the up and it’s poised over the long term to disrupt the Western financial establishment, which whether it likes to be labeled as such or not, includes privileged “crypto bros” who treated centralized token exchanges as casinos to 10-x their dollar wealth.
These people, once marginalized, are now poised to lead the industry’s recovery from its doldrums.
