So Long to the Clutter: A Cooling Crypto Market Will Bring Change We Need

Sheila Warren is head of blockchain and distributed ledger technology at the World Economic Forum.

After about a year of market upheaval, a few things seem clear: blockchain technology is still best-suited to core use cases involving needs like censorship resistance, and a lot of nonsense has exited the market.

Still, many brilliant minds remain hard at work on solving some of the technology's technical challenges.

What's significantly less clear is the potential, if any, that blockchain technology actually holds for the achievement of positive social impact.

The good news is that, along with the cooling market, the hype around blockchain tech as being the "Mother of all solutions" has finally started to quell, and we are starting to see a renewed focus on empowerment.

Decentralization and democratization are arguably, two of the core principles at the root of the technology's development.

Increased inclusion in traditional systems, whether through those systems' expansion or upheaval, remains one of the most exciting possibilities that this technology could bring about.

Many people dodge the word "Power", but blockchain technology has the potential to give citizen actors an enhanced stake in, and ability to influence, the systems that now control and entrap them, or that exclude them altogether.

In addition to a multi-stakeholder approach, which is slowly gaining traction, a robust and grounded policy framework is needed to ensure that the "Neutral" qualities of this technology don't simply replicate the problems of existing systems, as is already happening with cryptocurrency, with its often-opaque centralized intermediaries, market manipulation and over-the-counter trading desks, all of which mimic or replicate existing problems in the financial system.

Put succinctly, we seek to import community-driven technology methodology into our policy and technical build.