Crypto doesn’t need to be complex

If you’ve ever wandered into crypto social media, there is a lot of jargon – phrases that are specific to crypto and mostly indecipherable.  

Some of it has a ‘look how clever I am’ feel… ‘I need to look impressive, so I’m going to start talking about layers, liquidity pools, and the benefits of ERC-1155.’  That kind of thing.

There are lots of facets to crypto that make it attractive to the curious-of-mind.   It’s a new financial system, so there is going to be significant and constant innovation in tech.  And its relative youth and constant evolution naturally creates the need for new taxonomy.

Who would have thought five years ago you’d be explaining how to stake FEG, or how to swap to Wrapped Ether to buy NFTs on OpenSea.  Those things makes sense to some people, but not to most.  

And that is the battle for crypto.  The proliferation of data and crypto-heavy jargon adds to the perception that the sector is not just difficult to understand, but nigh-on impenetrable unless you’ve majored in computer science.

Crypto doesn’t need to be complex.  It shouldn’t be.  But if it doesn’t de-clutter, it will be the preserve of the few.  A sector built by blockchain developers for blockchain developers... is only really for developers.

The challenge is how to bridge the divide between crypto and traditional sectors.  How do we built tools that are robust but simple enough to be intuitive?  

At the moment, traditional finance is weary of crypto and anyone who has generated wealth in crypto, for the simple reason that it feels difficult to thoroughly assess the risks.

There is plenty of truth to this.  Rarely does anyone buy Bitcoin and sit on it.  You’ll buy Bitcoin first, then maybe Ethereum.  But before you know it, you’re knee deep in decentralised finance.  

How do you explain that to a bank, an accountant, or a solicitor?  For many, wealth generated in crypto cannot be verified and transitioned out through traditional finance.  It’s a bottleneck caused, at least in part, by complexity – the fear of not fully understanding what you’re really dealing with.  And the fear that you’ll do something wrong.

So how do we solve this from a source of funds viewpoint?  Simplification is key.  Strip out the unnecessary data.  Recreate the information so it looks and feels familiar to someone who is new to crypto.

One of the ways to get there is to understand that every crypto wallet, address, or portfolio tells a story.  It has a start, a middle, and (hopefully) an end.  

In that way, blockchain data contains the narrative of everyone’s holdings, which can be told chronologically.  More importantly, its understandable.  

After all, everyone loves a story.

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