According to the UN’s World Population Prospects 2022 report, the world’s population just reached 8 billion on 15 November 2022. This is a new milestone for our planet as we grew to a new number never seen before.
Aside from challenges, a growing community brings in opportunities and the promise of change as a whole new generation is forming and will be developing the future. And a more robust, advanced, and inclusive financial system can rank very high on the list of things that need to be addressed.
Financial markets have been through their fair amount of stress over the past couple of years; the Covid-19 pandemic, some intense geopolitical tensions, and the following energy crisis have caused the global economy to experience quite a ride, going from recession to growing economic activities and high inflation just to be faced with another glooming recession again.
Cryptocurrencies experienced quite some downfall as well, however, when we take into consideration the consecutive unfolding of dramatic events, we can see that the crypto market has actually become quite resilient and is overrunning one negative incident after another.
Bad Actors Don’t Define The Ecosystem
From Terra Luna’s crash to a row of VCs filing for bankruptcy to the recent shocking collapse of one of the crypto unicorns, the crypto ecosystem has been shouldering a lot over the past year. And even though some of the incidents had catastrophic implications for the crypto space, the market didn’t experience major capitulation.
Nonetheless, every cloud has a silver lining; the recent events are an indication that bad actors are gradually being forced out by a maturing market. And more importantly, we are learning new lessons along the way. The recent fall of the FTX, for instance, propelled more businesses to publish their “Proof of Reserves”, an audit that shows they’re truly holding their customers’ assets. This was the first step taken by the space to revive the damaged customer confidence and trust which will ultimately improve the safety of their funds as well.
What the crypto space is experiencing at the moment is nothing out of the ordinary for the finance world as all financial markets went through a handful of such events to reach the maturity they have today. What’s important is that we need to learn from these mistakes and remember that bad actors don’t define the crypto ecosystem.
8 Billion People, 8 Billion Lives, Endless Possibilities
We have reached an astonishing number; with 8 billion people comes endless possibilities and of course, challenges. According to WorldBank, 1.4 billion people in the world are still unbanked and unfortunately, this number will grow alongside the world’s population.
Cryptocurrencies can be of great help here. The borderless, cheap, and secure transactions that they bring to the table can help millions of people to access financial services without a bank account.
And it doesn’t stop there; through Decentralized Finance (DeFi), they can charge their crypto balances using OTC and P2P options and get access to various financial products. They can earn passive income through staking, get crypto-collateralized loans or even lend money to people and receive profits on their once-static funds.
Regulators and authorities around the world know for a fact that cryptocurrencies are here to stay and they can only protect customers and investors by establishing proper regulations. With a more robust and clear regulatory environment, we can expect more traditional businesses to enter the crypto space, bringing their useful and practical benefits to the growing number of residents on this planet.
