Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Welcome to this week’s edition of Tokenised.

My interest and fascination with the crypto sector began in October 2019. A wide-eyed graduate student at the time, I noticed bitcoin ATMs popping up in an area that was severely underbanked, even though it was part of the financial capital of the world—New York City.

Back then, the emergence of an alternate channel to move money was rather exciting to me, especially one that promised significant reductions in costs and faster transaction speeds. That isn’t how things have turned out, though.

The crypto sector of today, I believe, has become a nesting ground for rampant speculation on weak fundamentals. And that edifice has crumbled as the macroeconomic environment fostered by the pandemic started to shift. Crypto remains a nascent tool in need of a few more stages of metamorphosis, and all the drama of the past few years seems nothing more than a consequence of base profit-seeking. 

I am no soothsayer, but crypto in its current form has faltered in delivering utility beyond a few fringe cases.