Is it time to leave crypto?

Ever since the beginning of the cryptocurrency movement, its proponents have highlighted crypto’s revolutionary promise for businesses and individuals. It would, they said, free capital from the clutches of government and institutions. It would bring financial services to the unbanked. It would remove national borders as barriers to trade. In short – it was going to change everything.

But that was over 15 years ago. Since then, the business world has gone through a cycle of rush to accept crypto payments and then rush to stop. And many of the businesses that couldn’t stop talking about blockchain in the early days have since quietly abandoned their plans for the technology. To make matters worse, the crypto market itself is undergoing a correction that will give even seasoned Wall Street Brokers serious pause.

All of this raises a particular question: At this point, should companies wash their hands of crypto and move on?

The answer is not exact. There are still many aspects of crypto as a form of currency and as a technology that businesses should continue to explore. The trick will be to take a strategic approach to the situation to embrace the good parts of crypto while avoiding exposure to the risky or harmful parts. Here are the three areas where companies should train their forward-looking crypto focus.

Related: Crypto Market Crash

Facilitation of cheaper international transactions

Believe it or not, one of crypto’s earliest use cases – cross-border payments – remains the closest thing to a real success story. The reason for that is the fact that crypto’s relative value has very little to do with the nuts-and-bolts way it facilitates payments. It is the underlying blockchains of the various cryptocurrencies that do the heavy lifting in a cross-border transfer scenario.

There is plenty of evidence of crypto’s continued value as an international transaction medium. Consider, for example, the fact that most of the major incumbents in that market – such as MoneyGram and Western Union – are either already adopting blockchain or still have plans to do so. In addition, almost 25% of all cross-border payments already use cryptocurrencies or blockchain as a medium.

All of this means that businesses can safely bet on crypto and blockchain as a cross-border payment technology that is here to stay. They can move forward with plans to use blockchain-integrated payment and settlement systems and orient their internal processes to accommodate them. By doing so, they will gain significant cost advantages without any meaningful exposure to crypto’s many downsides.

Related: Transforming money transfers

Improvement of corporate governance

For a long time, it is fair to say that the general public neither understood nor cared to understand the nuanced world of corporate governance. Companies usually made their decisions behind closed doors and had only regulators to answer to. But ever since the run-up to the global financial crisis in 2008, people became acutely aware of how corporate decision-making can have a pervasive effect on the public record.

The problem is that apart from publishing more meeting documentation and putting out press releases, there have been no effective ways for companies to introduce transparency into their governance processes. And this is where Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) come in. They are a form of blockchain-based, transparent governance system that offers an alternative to traditional forms of corporate hierarchical decision-making.

Legal experts believe that DAOs can revolutionize corporate governance by introducing a workable means of bottom-up decision-making. It would eliminate the power that is now concentrated in the hands of a small corporate board, thereby making deliberate misconduct much less of a threat. And because blockchains allow complete visibility into the decision-making process, they create transparency by default. Both are desirable outcomes that business leaders would do well to work toward by exploring the applications of DAOs.

Related: What will the corporate board look like in the next 5 years?

Enables data monetization

Over the past decade, most businesses have recognized that data—and who controlled it—played a major role in financial outcomes. Furthermore, they recognized that data itself could represent a virtually unlimited revenue stream for those who found ways to monetize it. The problem was that data monetization creates security, provenance and privacy challenges that are not easy to overcome.

It turns out that blockchain technology is well suited to address these concerns. Its built-in encryption provides end-to-end security for stored data. And its immutability provides the perfect way to establish data provenance in an immutable way. When it comes to privacy, all that is required is to anonymize data before storing it in a blockchain system, and privacy is no longer an issue.

Best of all, this use case is not theoretical. China Unicom already has a working data revenue system built on a blockchain. And crypto projects like Kalima are building solutions that aim to accommodate the flood of data that companies must deal with when integrating IoT devices into their operations. The bottom line is that data monetization is right in blockchain’s wheelhouse, and that’s going to continue to be true no matter what happens to the crypto industry as a whole.

Related: It Takes a Village: How Blockchain, Crypto and NFTs Secure Digital Trust

Smart businesses should not abandon crypto

The bottom line here is simple. It’s that business leaders have every reason to cast a skeptical eye on the crypto industry right now. After all, it’s an industry full of problems that no sane businessman wants any part of. However, that doesn’t mean it’s time to walk away from crypto altogether.

As the examples above make clear, there are still smart and beneficial ways businesses can leverage cryptocurrencies and their related technology. Done right, it can still be transformative in an overwhelmingly positive way. But that’s the key to success – identifying a real and compelling business use case and focusing solely on it while leaving the larger crypto ecosystem to its own devices.