Markets go up. Markets go down. That is what markets do. At least in the short run. And the “crash” of the past few weeks has not even been that severe, although we will only learn of the bottom after we see the upswing.

The crash so far is not comparable to the dot com crash at the end of the last century. During that so-called nuclear winter, nobody serious really doubted the future of the Internet. A market where anybody with a domain name could raise a few million dollars was bound to crash. When the car industry started, there were a thousand car companies. The technology was so promising everybody felt like they could do it.

The exuberance around crypto is the true promise of the technology. The fundamental trajectory of the technology is strong. But greed is in the human domain.

You can’t play a great soccer game without a great, impartial, competent referee on the field. That referee has been missing in crypto. Crypto is a case for proactive regulation. With crypto, you only lose money. With AI, you will lose lives. We can’t have people dying before we start the discussion on seat belts. The seat belts and the airbags have to be built-in from the get-go.

The best way to regulate will be to form a T100, a global consortium of the 100 largest technology companies on the planet, that plays an advisory role for regulators. The T100 helps set the standards.

For example, look into Luna. It just blew a $40 billion hole in the crypto market. What was it? Did it have the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme? I never got a chance to dig into it. DeFi is full of promise but Ponzi schemes can not be allowed.

Crypto has to solve the problem of identity for everybody, it has to solve the problem of most people not having bank accounts. Otherwise, you are just inviting bad behavior. Scammers are like seaweed in the sea. Crypto holds the promise to change that. But not completely unregulated crypto.