Pi

My name is Christina. After 10 years in crypto, I still believe. This is why. It was around 2013 when I got pulled into imagining a new economic model. Central banks and monetary policy had failed us. The financial crisis had pulled economics out of the specialist drawer it used to sit in, and the assumptions that came apart in 2008 stayed apart for a generation who were now wondering what else was possible. Studying business had given me dissatisfying answers. Studying philosophy had given me an instinct for better questions. Now I was asking them. Bitcoin started as a passing mention, but within a few years it was most of what I wanted to think about. Crypto was the best playing field I had ever found for the things I cared about: how societies get governed, how organisations really make decisions, what economics does when you speed-run things in months instead of decades. But the road was hard. What came next was not the straight line of progress. Through painful corrections and black swans I watched my industry cycle through manias and crashes, through long stretches where the loudest version of crypto was a casino engineered to make people feel clever while it relieved them of their money. Through collapses and calamities something endured: the provocation underneath. That there was a new finance threatening to emerge that looked different. At first crypto seemed to just survive each wave like a disruptive cockroach, but slowly something substantial has begun to change. It is proof that the original vision of crypto has started to arrive: now the counterparties are stablecoin issuers and the institutions that spent a decade dismissing all of it. The tone has turned serious because the stakes are finally global, and the question I walked in with is getting answered at a scale it never had when it was just a toy. Crypto has product market fit. It has a place in world finance. And if crypto keeps succeeding, it keeps multiplying. New chains arrive whenever someone needs something the existing ones cannot give, more scale, more speed, a different security model, and each answer becomes its own island. A pile of islands is not an ecosystem, and that gap is the opportunity for us. @squidrouter is the unglamorous, necessary version of the thing I had been chasing since I was nineteen: the theoretical question of how value ought to move between people and systems, turned into the operational one that is now the whole job, which is to move it, across all of it, for whoever shows up. I believe crypto is going everywhere and you need something to hold the pieces together, which is most of why I am here. The job’s not done.