One key lesson of 2022 is that “money crypto” and “tech crypto” need to be treated differently. Money crypto in this context includes crypto-financial services such as custody, exchanges, market making, investing and lending. And tech crypto includes open-source, public permissionless innovation such as blockchains, decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFT), Web3 gaming, wallets, tools and infrastructure. Financial stability and consumer protection failures in crypto did not arise from the failure of technology, but the failure of oversight and controls. DeFi blue chips continued to operate without a glitch last year, while large opaque, centralized crypto financial institutions collapsed like dominoes.
