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Will crypto’s real-world impact become more evident in 2023?

Crypto Council’s Sheila Warren hopes to see more of crypto’s real-world use cases emerging in the media next year.

Welcome to Forkast Forecasts 2023. In this series, leaders, innovators and visionaries in blockchains share their industry predictions for the year ahead.

Sheila Warren

Sheila Warren is the inaugural chief executive officer of the Crypto Council for Innovation, the global alliance advancing crypto innovation worldwide. Warren co-hosts “Money Reimagined,” a podcast series at CoinDesk, is an advisor to the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web and the NEAR Foundation, serves on the Steering Committee of the DeFi Education Fund and is an early-stage investor across the Web 3.0 ecosystem. 

Predictions for 2023

Crypto will continue to have real-world impact, even if it goes unnoticed

“There were a lot of positive things this year, some of which got lost maybe in the media or the mainstream press. That doesn’t mean there weren’t positive developments. The technology made a lot of strides… The fact that we had Ukraine literally launching a wartime defense effort, leveraging crypto donations, that’s a huge deal. It just shocks me to this day that that’s not a major takeaway from this year, that we were able to do something that traditional cash really couldn’t do and the international community — couldn’t mobilize the billion dollars that, of course, are critical to the Ukraine war effort. But that was catalyzed by crypto donations. That’s a really big deal… My hope is that we will wind up surfacing more of these stories of empowerment.”

Regulatory discussions will resume in 2023

“We’re going to see a lot of activity in the US Congress, a lot of discussions, a lot of talking about potential legislation or rules or this kind of thing. Whether that translates into concrete action is a different question. But the activity is certainly going to remain the same. It’s going to be a hot topic.”

“You already have Singapore, which has come down with some pretty clear state of play, at least like a framework, a sense of what the regulatory model might look like. And you’ve got India leading the G20, which has internally very different views. RBI has one particular view that’s not particularly pro-crypto, but other ministers and parliamentarians have a slightly different view and might be more open at the state level. Lots of Indian actors are very positive on the technology specifically, but it’s hard to know how India is going to ultimately wind up landing in some places because of the diversity of views and opinions.”

Asia’s role in the crypto ecosystem will become more apparent

“We’re going to see more awareness of the importance of Asia and ASEAN in the ecosystem, whether that’s from a regulatory perspective, whether that’s in terms of adoption and user base or technology. We’re going to see more and more expansion of the awareness of the importance of Asia in the broader systems over the course of the year.”