I often think about how lucky I am to have grown up in the country I did.
I’ve never really had to worry about anything, apart from my own made-up problems that sometimes run rampant in my brain.
I’ve never experienced war, never lived under dictatorship, and the only times I've ever gone hungry are because I’ve decided to do it to myself by experimenting with fasting.
Growing up, I always had a roof over my head, access to clean drinking water, a decent education, and parents that cared about me deeply.
As I grew older, I opened a bank account, got a job, bought a car, started (and failed) a few businesses, learned about the stock market, invested in American companies like Apple and Tesla, discovered Bitcoin, and eventually became a boomer and moved most of my wealth into index funds and property.
I had freedom. Freedom to experiment. Freedom to fail.
My opportunity for success was only really limited by my own work ethic and intelligence.
But for a large proportion of the world, this simply is not their reality.
They are trying to swim with one hand tied behind their back and weights placed on their legs.
But now, more than ever, I am starting to truly believe that crypto is might actually change things.
I often hear my friends ask, “Why would people want access to stablecoins if the dollar is going to zero and they don’t pay any yield?”
And to that, I present this map showing various inflation rates across the globe.
Yes, you might miss out on 4% annual yield by holding USDT, but that’s far better than watching your purchasing power get cut in half just for saving in your local currency.
What's the point of bringing stocks on-chain? Why not just hold them in your brokerage account?
Well, the problem with that is not everyone has access to basic financial services like bank accounts, let alone a brokerage account, and very often, even those that do get absolutely giga rinsed on currency exchange and trading fees.
Recently, I experienced a micro version of financial exclusion. UK residents were blocked from participating in the Plasma ICO because of insanely stupid government regulations. We also are still not able to invest in a Bitcoin ETF.
And whilst these two individual items will not make a huge difference to my overall financial stability, the feeling of having opportunity slip through my fingers solely because some decrepit old government employee has deemed it too risky makes me irrationally angry, and very, very, very close to taking my family and relocating elsewhere on the globe.
Now imagine that kind of exclusion, but for everything. No access to index funds. No dollar bank accounts. No stable savings.
And that’s why when I watched the Robinhood event yesterday and saw Vlad unveil stock tokens, I felt genuinely pretty excited. For a long time, you had to squint to see a future where all of the world’s assets ended up on-chain. Now it’s literally on the roadmap for one of the biggest fintech companies on the planet.
And whilst it’s easy for us to sit there in our safe and secure, sometimes air-conditioned offices and whine and moan that this is not Satoshi’s original vision, I counter by saying that it’s a bloody good outcome, and we are infinitely better off in this reality than the one where Bitcoin fizzled out at $30 and CBDCs became the de facto financial layer of the world.
And even if you hate the idea of centralised stablecoins, or the custodial risk of tokenised stocks, Hyperliquid will soon offer a crypto-native alternative, Bitcoin is looking healthier than ever, Ethereum, the last I checked, is still very decentralised, and we have teams like Plasma, Monad and MegaETH working hard to push the limits of high-throughput chains.
Plasma will help bring stability to the masses by offering the ability to
And ultimately, for all the stupid stuff that goes on in crypto, the things that makes me sad and question why I'm still here, the scams, the drama, the hacks. It is a drop in the ocean compared to the collective good that this industry will bring when anyone with an internet connection has unfettered access to the best financial products on earth.
Crypto won’t stop war, end hunger, or bring Samantha back.
But maybe, just maybe -- it’ll help billions grow up with the same opportunity that I had.
