You’ll probably have read about the current, let’s say, zesty vibrancy in the crypto market.
There’s a lot of volatility on offer to munch your popcorn along to: NFT trading has “collapsed”; Trillions of (real-world) dollars has been wiped off the value of cryptocurrencies; people have been openly wondering what might happen if crypto exchange Coinbase goes bust; and others have been mulling whether it can really be just a coincidence that all this happened just as Mr Bean launched his own NFTs.
Of more pressing interest might be the “de-pegging” of “stablecoin” Terra, which – to cut a long, complicated explanation short – is A Bad Thing for anything connected to crypto.
We wrote about stablecoins – one called Tether, specifically – last year. We warned of the risks involved in putting your money, business, hopes, dreams, and artists’ careers into a technology that is not only hard to understand, but is also highly volatile, largely untested, and that has some murky accusations swirling around it.
Now people are eyeing Tether closely too – because if it drops in value, it will cause huge ripple effects on the value of bitcoin. And then – because everything is somehow quasi-connected in the crypto world – those ripples will hit Ethereum, and then it’ll hit your NFT or web3 project too, which is where many more people start to get affected.
And that’s why Music Ally is writing about this: we’re excited about the possibilities web3 could bring to the music industry, but also, we don’t want artists’ and music companies’ hard work and time to suddenly become worthless because of something weird we don’t understand happening deep below the surface.
(Conversely, there are a lot of people who want their hard work and time to suddenly become incredibly valuable because of something weird they don’t understand happening deep below the surface; and this is probably equally troublesome.)
Of course, nothing bad may happen at all: everything is possible in the crypto world! But *something* is going on right now, and maybe things are slowing down a bit in the “money” part of web3. And that… might be a good thing?
Perhaps this cooling behaviour / market correction / sparks and fire fizzing wildly out of your bitcoin wallet (take your pick) is reminiscent of the late-1990s dot.com bubble, which saw some of the early web services vastly over-valued.
That too was a period of wild excitement and inflation which was followed by a loud popping noise, leaving a slew of tech startups by the wayside. Even Amazon only just made it out alive.
So, maybe, yes, this crypto-wobble could become like that. And if it does, there will be repercussions, hand-wringing, and some very upset people. But equally, it might not do that! This is crypto, after all.
Our point is this: whatever happens, the web3 technology at its core will likely survive, and this is the really important part. It still has the potential to become a key layer within the music business, a bit like ecommerce (Web 1.0) and social media (Web 2.0) is now.
And if that’s the case, Music Ally’s basic approach to web3 stays the same as it has been since before the NFT craze began: one of moderation, education, and measured risk. In an ideal world, web3 tech will settle into a suite of new, very good tools that can be used to build creative, exciting and liberating music businesses with.
Less a saviour or meta-disrupter, and more a positive evolution, driven in our world by musicians and music people who love the technology, and crypto/tech people who love music. Whatever happens next in the current #CryptoCrash, that longer-term outcome would surely be a positive one.
Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash
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