Amid Chaos, Our Decentralized Future Is Being Built

Michael J. Casey is the chairman of CoinDesk's advisory board and a senior advisor of blockchain research at MIT's Digital Currency Initiative.

If, during CoinDesk's Consensus conference in May 2017, I'd predicted the crypto and blockchain industry's subsequent experiences, you wouldn't have believed me.

New projects from Polkadot, Ripple and Cosmos and others sought cross-blockchain interoperability while still more worked on decentralized exchanges for custody-free token trading.

The UN, the IMF and the World Bank set up blockchain labs.

People everywhere were striving to make blockchain go live.

Unlike the mostly academic and publicly funded founders of the internet, who worked for decades in relative obscurity before their work on packet switching and the Transmission Control and internet protocols was ready for the online boom in the nineties, blockchain developers are in the spotlight.

The big, underlying idea, I believe, is that blockchain technology can upend not just the business models of recent decades but a millennia-old societal practice of deep significance to civilization.

Blockchain is a software technology, but its sweeping potential has fostered a giant sideline industry of speculation and ideation.

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CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.