Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.
If you were to list the greatest challenges facing humanity, would anyone have ‘centralised finance’ as their personal number one? Would it make anyone’s top ten? It wouldn’t be in mine.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate the inefficiency of interbank payments, I don’t think ordinary earners and savers should be at the mercy of central banks, and I believe in the efficiency of smart contracts and protocols. But life is about setting priorities, and issues like global hunger, disease, poverty and corruption tend to come higher up my list.
It’s ironic that the most recent boom in evangelism for a decentralised future, powered by web3, coincided with the height of the Covid pandemic. Trapped inside by government lockdowns, we all got excited about crypto, web3 and building a great decentralised future. We maybe lost sight of the more pressing cause, working out how to stay alive and get out of our dang living rooms.
Where I am guilty of being a starry-eyed true believer, though, is my faith in the power of technology to solve problems. Mankind’s progress, particularly on issues like development, poverty and disease, has always come in waves coinciding with industrial revolutions.
The first saw inventions like the steam engine, the second gave us the airplane and lightbulb, the third saw the advent of true globalization and consumer electronics which paved the way for what our community is building today. The fourth industrial revolution looks to be characterised by the rapid adoption of automation and data exchange in cyber-physical systems, with an emphasis on decentralised protocols.
In the Nineteenth Century, nobody believed that the great problem facing society was a need to travel longer distances by mechanical means. Solving that practical problem, though, had exponential effects, ushering in an age of urbanisation and automation. The problems solved by the steam engine were poverty and inequality, not issues in transportation.
If we’re going to fight climate change, poverty, disease, we’ll need technologies with similar potential for exponential effects. How can we harness the exponential potential of decentralised protocols?
Let’s consider the millions of people in Africa without access to a bank account, or with an account that doesn’t give them access to the full range of financial products and services enjoyed in the US. A product that extended access to current accounts, overdrafts and credit would help individuals provide for their families and run businesses, but it would also unleash a powerful engine of potential for economic growth.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel to get there. Too many people looking at the potential for crypto in Africa want to build a whole new financial system to accommodate it. The world of cryptocurrency is complex and off-putting for lots of ordinary consumers in the US and Europe. If you’ve never had a bank account, the chances are you’re going to be wary of putting your savings into a crypto wallet, deal with an exchange, find a way of converting paper money into digital gold.
We can fix that problem by making crypto feel more familiar. If you can have a debit card linked to a secure wallet, and that combination allows you to hold currency more easily and more securely than in a bank, that’s a problem solved.
Some people could see the SafeMoon debit card as a ‘compromise’ with the old financial system, that working with a card payment provider is somehow selling out. That’s nonsense. What we’re doing is inventing a link between the possibilities of crypto and the convenience and familiarity of traditional banking.
Our crypto debit card won’t, I can promise you, be as influential as the steam engine. It does though, solve a practical problem, linking the familiar world of banking to the new world of crypto. If that makes it easier to bring financial services to people without current accounts, and unlocks some of those exponential effects, then that’s more important to me that building a perfect trustless and decentralized financial system.
Decentralisation cannot ever be an end in itself. Blockchain is a great technology, but we’ll only realise its potential if we use it to solve problems. This model of venture philanthropy is at the core of everything we do at SafeMoon. When coming up with new inventions and updates to current ones, we always ask ourselves ‘how will this improve the user experience? How will this have a real return on impact?’
As Thomas Edison said, ‘there’s a way to do it better – find it’ – This is the ethos of who we are at SafeMoon and encapsulates the journey we are on together with our SafeMoon Army. We continue innovating and driving forward knowing that this is just the start.
