"The Cryptopians" author and "Unchained" podcast host Laura Shin weighs in on how the crypto industry has changed since the collapse of FTX and the recent conviction of the exchange's founder Sam Bankman-Fried. "The crypto community turned against Sam once they realized that some legislation that he was championing in Congress would benefit centralized actors," Shin said. After the collapse of FTX, she heard from entrepreneurs that "they really learned their lesson."
What I've seen and I frankly saw this pretty early on is that people were just doubling down on decentralization. They were realizing that, you know, I mean, I'm sure you know that in the crypto industry, the ideal that's often built, been held up is around building decentralized applications to centralize money, um you know, whatever it might be. And, you know, Saman and Fried's Empire was really built around centralized companies and entities. And even before the collapse of FTX, we did see that in a way the crypto community turned against Sam once they realized that some legislation that he was championing in Congress would benefit centralized actors over what many of many people in the crypto community. Um you know, felt they were really aiming for which was a more decentralized world and more products and services that could be offered to people in a decentralized manner. And so I feel that, like I said, pretty much immediately after the collapse, I was hearing from our entrepreneurs that they really learned their lesson. And it is true that obviously, in order to get this industry off the ground, there has been this period of centralized actors that have been necessary, you know, Coinbase is probably a prime example where they really built that on ramp from traditional uh from the traditional financial system to the crypto world, which, you know, at least aims to be decentralized. I don't know if it's always achieved that yet. Um But the point is that, you know, many people see that as, you know, what's necessary to kind of bring people over into the crypto economy, but that's not the direction people are headed. And so, um you know, we've just seen kind of a doubling down of, you know, more ways to make sure that different parts of the crypto ecosystem are not vulnerable to single points of failure.
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