Rain's Mission

Ten years ago people were asking me What is Bitcoin? Five years ago it was Is crypto legal? Now the question I get is When can I use crypto in my everyday life?

The beauty of the crypto space is that it makes you ask questions like: What is money? or What is a market?, for the first time.

We have used many forms of money over the course of human history¹. We wrote ledgers on clay tablets. We used objects commonly found in nature, like shells. Eventually we settled on precious metals, like gold and silver, which served as a robust global monetary standard for thousands of years. Precious metals limited the ability for any individual to create money out of thin air, which proved to be a defining feature for a financial system.

Today, our world is rife with inflation. While everyday people work hard to earn and save for their future, inflation causes the floor of the economy to continue to sink and prices to rise, and each day people are forced to step on a treadmill of investment to outpace the effects of inflation. What happened to our ability to just save and retain value? At the same time, the world has never been more ready for a global monetary system. Each decade, our world becomes more and more globalized. With global information, logistics, energy, and transportation systems, we already live in an incredibly connected world.

We even have global financial systems, but this picture continues to be quite fragmented and leaves much to be desired. Sending value across borders still means correspondent banks, wait times, and fees that land hardest on the people who can least afford them. We need financial systems that work anywhere and hold value for 100 years and more. Cryptocurrency (abbreviated as “crypto” for short) is the most serious attempt that we have seen to achieve this vision.

Crypto is actually a 35 year industry in the making. As soon as the internet was created, people tried to start sending money over it. A group at Princeton wrote an incredible book called Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies which chronicles the attempts, all of which failed. It took a couple decades of iteration, but people soon realized that cryptography(a branch of mathematics) could be used as a foundation for a monetary system. Neil Stephenson even wrote a science fiction book about the concept called Cryptonomicon, which inspired Paypal to be founded.

The concept had a meteoric ascent through the rise of Bitcoin, which struck a chord with many people around the world creating an exciting new community and ecosystem. Other protocols followed, each making its own trade-offs or chasing a different use case. At its core, this industry is about financial systems that are governed solely by software instead of discretion. Many often call it an “internet of money”, and the comparison holds. It allows for the same global and permission-less exchange of information as the internet, but for value exchange.

Using crypto, we can solve the problems of the existing financial system in the same way software solves most modern problems of our day. We can treat inflation and financial crises as bugs in the system, and iterate on the system to make them increasingly rare. Crypto is the closest thing we have ever seen to a money that can have the modern conveniences of a virtual economy, yet retain the nature and benefits of precious metals. It’s still nascent, but it poses immense potential.

Hope to see you soon,