What comes after FTX for Blockchain technology?

If you haven’t been following the saga of the collapse of the centralized cryptocurrency exchange known as FTX, you can catch up here. Sam Bankman-Fried, the one-time chief executive of the stock exchange, was loved and referred to as the “good” billionaire, making hefty donations and championing “effective altruism.”

As FTX has declared bankruptcy and its financial folly has come to light, the crypto world has once again taken up the war cry of “not your keys, not your coins.” A slogan for decentralization, warning that if holders of crypto want to own their assets securely, they must keep them in a self-custodial wallet.

So with broken trust for centralized exchanges like FTX, what’s next for blockchain technology?

Coinbase, FTX, Binace and more all offer something that decentralized solutions do not have and will never have, which is ease of use. Users come to these experiences for the same reason they trust banks with their money instead of keeping it in a coffee can under their familiar mattresses. They allow an individual to outsource financial custody and provide easy administration.

Metamask and other self-service solutions have a place in the ecosystem, but their traction and use will always be niche. Adoption is driven by ease of use and value for consumers, the easiest way for a company to handle this is to centralize and abstract the services that are most cumbersome.

In the short term, we see a pushback from exchanges owned by large companies that deposit assets on behalf of a user, but it is unlikely that the blockchain world as it is perceived today can grow in this way. If anything, we’ll see it shrink even more niche in terms of users and applications.

The current downturn in cryptocurrency values ​​and venture capital funding for blockchain-based startups is often referred to as “crypto winter.” During this winter, many pre-funded companies are using the time to build and prepare for fairer weather markets. But what if the speculative nature of the industry is not the industry at all?

The applications of blockchain that we have seen so far from bitcoin to altcoins, from NFTs to the metaverse are based on speculative financial models and trading. It’s an industry, you can call it finance at best and gambling at worst. However, these industries can be powered by any technology, and have historically been able to leverage blockchains, but finance and gambling itself cannot need it.

Blockchain exists as a technology in the same way that databases or javascript do, it is a tool for developers and companies to exploit if it serves their goals and needs, labeling it as an industry vs. a technology is perhaps our biggest mistake with the whole ordeal. What would be different if we just referred to FTX as an unregulated trading platform? Would the story and its growth have played out differently?

Blockchain is here forever, it is a technology that will find uses and be used for niche but powerful applications. Every time the industries driven by blockchain force to rethink how it actually fits into the technological landscape. We don’t refer to companies as SQL companies (a common database technology), so why is blockchain any different?