30 years ago, the Internet was born with a simple concept: the transfer of information between two computers over a network. All the applications and services we know today were built on this fact. From the simplest to the most complex, from Google to WhatsApp, including Netflix. All these services are based on the ability to transfer information between two points. through the network.
Three decades later, technology has taken a significant leap. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, whose true identity has never been revealed, published an article in the crypto community describing a peer-to-peer digital money system. Until then, no one had managed to transfer value over the internet without an intermediary. It was necessary to use a financial institution, Bizum or Paypal to validate the transaction. It wasn’t until the birth of Bitcoin that it was possible to transfer value between two points via a network without an intermediary.
More than a decade later, the cryptoasset revolution has little to do with the rising or falling value of cryptocurrencies. I would go so far as to say that the value of cryptocurrencies is somewhat irrelevant at this point. The transformative power of the crypto-economy lies in the ability to use technology facilitate social coordination through an incentive system.
There is a question that everyone asks when we talk about crypto assets: what is behind them? The first answer is clear: technology. The second is deeper: it matters. If we talk about bitcoin or ether, behind it is a system of incentives and objective and immutable rules that determine its price, form of emission and utility in the market. If we talk about other well-known crypto-assets such as stablecoinsas USDC or tether, the answer is simpler: each cryptocurrency is backed by one dollar.
When someone buys USDC, they are buying dollars represented by the cryptocurrency. This has huge implications that few people still understand. If we are talking about tokens like those offered by Reental on its platform, Behind your cryptocurrency is a tokenized property, By buying this cryptocurrency, you get a share of the profitability of the said asset.
Both European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde and other officials used a surprising argument to attack cryptoassets the statement that “there is nothing” behind cryptocurrencies. They should at least study cryptocurrencies like USDC which has a market cap of $42 billion and is backed by money. fiat before commenting.
Development of products and services in the area The crypto economy is creating a huge digital divide similar to that created by the internet. Even today, many countries are suffering the consequences of their failure to adapt to the technological revolution that created the Internet. From public administration to financial services, everyone has had to adapt, but this process has created significant inequalities between those citizens who know and have access to technology and those who do not.
Something similar will happen to those who are able to properly understand the changes that cryptoassets bring. The crypto-economic revolution is not only technological, it is primarily social. These systems enable new forms of social coordination through technology. The technology and way of interacting with these systems creates a great system of trust for the untrusting.
A new financial system is born based on reality the ability to transfer value over a network between two points without an intermediary. New services are being built on this fact, from loans between individuals to the provision of liquidity through arbitrage. All this in an unmediated, open and transparent manner.
Technology has come to make tasks that were not so efficient before, more efficient. But in this case, The crypto economy is generating disruption that could be even bigger than the internet. This enabled the exchange of information that allowed companies like Netflix, Amazon, Google and Facebook to be built. All of them have in common that they are based on information exchange services over a network. In the case of the crypto-economy or internet of value, companies are built on the exchange of value between two points, which has an impact beyond just digital transformation.
Everyone who creates their company today aspires not to go public, but to tokenize it get finance in the global market. When an entrepreneur tokenizes ownership of their business and markets it, they can get funding globally and quickly. Anyone who buys a token participates in the company’s capital, regardless of where they live, from New Zealand to the UK.
Globally, this way of raising capital is beginning to change the origin map of impact firms. Until now, unicorns were born and raised where funding could be obtained and where there was a market for the development of their initiative. However, You no longer have to be in Silicon Valley to get noticed by big funds. Funding can be raised globally from anywhere by issuing tokens.
There are indications that Spain and Europe may be missing an important train: The stable cryptocurrency tether (whose value is 1 US dollar) has surpassed VISA in terms of transaction volume. Few people in Spain have heard of Tether, but we all carry VISA in our wallets. Today, 17% of Spaniards are clients of a bank that no one knows. This is the percentage of Spaniards who purchased the USDC cryptocurrency issued by the CIRCLE entity. Basically, there are almost a fifth of the country’s population who deposited money in CIRCLE and withdrew this cryptocurrency linked to the value of the dollar.
All this should make us think. The most dangerous digital divide is not one that affects citizens, but rather one that affects governments and the highest institutions. Ignorance of the potential, risks and opportunities that the crypto-economy brings will have the immediate consequence of reducing opportunities for citizens. Europe has missed the Internet train and most of the big companies in this sector were founded on the other side of the Atlantic. We cannot afford it, neither as a continent nor as a country Ignorance of technology puts our citizens and societies in the background of world development. The second digital divide threatens Europe by turning the old continent into an old continent.
*Teodoro García Egea is a doctor of telecommunications engineering