Why crypto will have the largest social impact of our lifetime

Listen as Joah Santos, CMO at Aldrin, shares his thoughts on why crypto will have the largest social impact of our lifetime, the current landscape of crypto adoption and the difference between investing in digital vs current assets.

Aldrin’s mission is to build the ultimate ecosystem to cut working time in half and make money work for their customers.

How is crypto going to change our lives, both in the short and long term?

Crypto has the power to change peoples’ lives, the same way AirBnB has changed homeowners’ lives, for example, but there is a lot more money involved so the impact will be even more powerful.

What could be the repercussions, either positive or negative, to mass crypto adoption from a social impact perspective? 

It’s a difficult question to answer – if adoption happened quickly it would put a lot of pressure on fiat currency. If total adoption happened, those who didn’t move would suffer. The advantages of crypto is that when you reduce the middle man it’s more beneficial for the final consumer – which is what happens with crypto, capital will be more available to everyone.

What is the landscape like when comes to crypto adoption currently – especially with comparison between the US and other countries?

In countries like Turkey that have a 40% inflation rate, or El Salvador, for example, a large part of the population are getting involved with crypto. In the US, adoption is a lot more speculative, whereas other countries are looking at is as a safe comparison to their own currency.

We’re still in the early stages of the adoption curve – in comparison to the internet adoption years, we’re currently in about 2001. The community is small, but it feels like everyone in our network is talking about it.

Why do you think that the adoption curve is so similar between crypto and the internet, considering how different the landscape is twenty years later?

The iPad was the fastest ever adoption of new technology, but it was still an extension of what had come before. Something truly innovative, like the internet or crypto, generally will take the same amount of time for adoption, even when the climate is so ripe for something different.

Is crypto going to offset the issue of people needing to invest versus keeping their money in cash?

The problem with cumulative inflation throughout history is that it goes up and down – the issue is that a lot of money is printed, but never taken out of circulation. Cryptocurrency has a limited supply, there’s a scarcity there which doesn’t happen with the dollar. Crypto inflation will probably be the same – it might go up one year to 14% but then it will be down at 7% the next, which all eventually evens out.

Are enough of us getting involved with building this new global and inclusive financial system? 

Right now its run by developers – we’re currently going through a transition phase where we need a hybrid between using banking as a service, before people more to crypto completely. The hybrid phase creates a bridge to get more people to adopt the new system.

How do we make crypto and DeFi mainstream in the US?

Advertising at the Super Bowl was huge – it really planted the flag on the moon. Everyone starts with centralized exchanges in crypto and then end up getting into DeFi from there, because they are interested in different tokens that they couldn’t get through normal exchange. So, using normal advertising techniques to develop people’s interest in the space initially is a really good start.