How I see the cryptosphere panning out in 2023

Vice came out with a video, “Scams, Zealots, and Jet Skis: Life Inside of the Crypto Scene” about a week ago on December 21 and I think it describes the 2022 crypto shitshow perfectly. In the end, no one cares that there are wonderful builders working behind the scenes. No one cares that bringing decentralization to our infrastructures like wifi, energy, and storage can democratize essential utilities. No one cares about the premise of owning and monetizing your own digital output. All that people see is what was shown in that video: greed, unethical behavior, and the premise that there is no actual value to the word behind crypto.

With that I’d like to say, you cannot go lower than here (I hope). At least now I’m more vigilant to the types of people and “projects” (aka scams) out there. Comparing now to the post dotcom bubble similar issues like hacks and phishing still occurred, but eventually the system got better. We got antivirus protection and other internet safeguards such as firewalls, and education/ increased awareness. I see a similar trajectory happening in web3. Up until recently, I didn’t realize how easy it is to click on the wrong link and (almost) give my information to the wrong entity (bye funds). This year I want to see more preventative measures in this regard.

Other than the obvious let’s drop scam culture and our naiveness around it, I’m also looking forward to the tooling and application developments around DAOs. For instance, I’m eager to get a better tool than discord. Optimally one that is based around DAOs and has security built in mind. I also don’t particularly like the experience of using it, and Naval seems to agree with me (just a big Naval fangirl here). It will be interesting to see how groups use token driven DAOs for instances like owning public goods such as a city. I'm also curious to see Reddit’s community which evolved from WallStreetBets like culture, to standing out with the robustness of its NFTs, to the next evolution where DAOs come into play (this is just my bet).

For 2023, we will also see the next phase of smart contract NFTS progress→ tokenization of broadband data, tokenization for asset tracking, tokenization of work. Can’t forget that this is followed by the needed traceability and composability we will see with zero knowledge rollups (for privacy) and the rise of account abstraction wallets (ERC-4337). Essentially, though, more than the obvious scalability tech needed that's in progress, in 2023 more apps will be developed. Coinbase is a prime leader of a near perfect app that enables a regular joe/tal like me to go and buy an env name easily, securely, and on my phone if I please. Apps like this need to be developed for everything-crypto-else. I want to directly contribute and vote to a community through an app. Make that possible and soon enough better security, interoperability and other solutions will be so needed there will be more talent flooding in to build and more demand as customers rush to participate to increase their ownership in everything digital.