Crypto is in Wonderland and upside-down in the rabbit hole
Not as many kids read Alice In Wonderland these days. The unmarried Lewis Carroll (aka the Reverend Charles Dodgson) was overly fond of young girls including Alice Liddell, the inspiration of the eponymous book.
Carroll’s reputation suffered after his death, and it’s easy to see why. Let’s just say dressing and photographing the six-year-old Alice Liddell in off-the-shoulder rags as a beggar doesn’t exactly disprove suspicion.
The book, however, has never been out of print for more than 150 years and re-reading it this week brought back a welter of hallucinogenic memories as I decided to trust the tale, not the artist.
The book was extraordinarily influential in its Victorian day leading to many in the surrealism and modernism movements adopting its ‘nonsense’. Without Carroll it is likely that the great works of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce would have been very different.
The characters in the book are well-known. The Queen Of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, Alice herself, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter and even the phrase rabbit-hole, used to describe any unorthodox thought, idea or experience, is prated everywhere by (unimaginative) people.
My rereading of the book this week triggered connections with the crypto wonderland and all the characters in it. I won’t do it, but all the characters mentioned in the previous paragraph could have crypto counterparts. I’ll just leave the Mad Hatter and Gary Gensler with you.
You’re welcome. So, let’s go down the aforesaid and overused rabbit-hole and see what could have been found there this week.
Obviously, XRP was in wonderland after a US federal judge ruled that Ripple’s XRP token was a security when Ripple previously sold it to institutional investors, but not to the general public.
This sounds as if it was written by Lewis Carroll, a type of nonsense that could mean all things to all people. Naturally, crypto dudes saw any sort of not-bad-news as good news and the XRP price skyrocketed yesterday, bringing Bitcoin and Ethereum with it. At time of writing, it looked as if the sentiment would endure.
Such a weird catalyst may just be the beginning of the bull run. After recent conferences in Prague and Baku, the confidence from so-called bigwigs that I spoke to, was as sky-high as any metaphorical rocket direction and it may be time to CODL (Cling). Times are finally going to get interesting again.
Writing for Bloomberg about the federal ruling, great friend and ex-CityAM writer Emile Nicolle made as much sense as anybody when trying to pick through the verdict so I quote and paraphrase:
“Many successful crypto projects these days rely on early sales of their tokens to institutional investors and VCs prior to their public launch in order to get off the ground, often pre-registering those efforts with regulators to avoid potential repercussions.
“Many on the SEC’s list of possible securities had conducted these types of arrangements, and the SEC cited those examples as reasons the tokens should fall under its remit. With Thursday’s ruling, that type of pre-funding might be done for, unless VCs fancy buying on the open market when prices are subject to the same volatility as everyone else.”
So, perhaps this is not about whether this is a win or loss for Ripple or crypto, rather something that could have huge ramifications for private and public sales, a model that was effectively bypassing VCs.
Who knows? The world, like Carroll’s other famous tome, Through The Looking-Glass, seems to have been turned upside-down over the past lustrum and everything seems more and more peculiar indeed.
Anyway, time to stop reading and writing. Time to have a long Friday lunch and I’m late for a very important date. Time to go back up the rabbit-hole, where it’s even weirder than it is in Wonderland.
Strange days indeed.
Monty Munford advises the world’s fastest-growing companies in blockchain, AI, mobile and NFTs on growth and visibility. In the past decade his consultancy has helped more than 40 companies raise money/exit for a total of $1.4 billion.
He currently works/invests with EasyTranslate, Mutual Mobile and Degen Labs.
Munford was previously a weekly tech columnist for Forbes in New York, the Telegraph in the UK and continues to write regularly for the BBC, The Economist and… CityAM.
He is also a keynote speaker/emcee/moderator/interviewer and has spoken at more than 200 global events interviewing figures such as Tim Draper, the late John McAfee, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Wozniak (twice in Beirut and Vienna), Kim Kardashian (once in Armenia), Amitabh Bachchan, Ghostface Killah, ZZ Top, Guns N’ Roses and many others.