Bitcoin standard is holding on during the crypto winter. Learn more from October 18-19 in NYC: IDEAS 2022.

Bitcoin (BTC) standard is holding on during the crypto winter.  Learn more from October 18-19 in NYC:  What to Expect From CoinDesk's IDEAS 2022 Event, https://youtu.be/MrgiPeYn9Es The impacts and implications of Web3 – incorporating blockchain technologies and token economies – are wide-ranging and profound, touching multiple industries and communities.

Is crypto the future of finance? The future of the internet? Will it impact culture and entertainment? What does this mean for investors? Experts weigh in on the future of crypto as currency ahead of CoinDesk's next conference. IDEAS 2022 by CoinDesk is taking place October 18-19 in New York City, where attendees can learn directly from entrepreneurs leading innovation across digital assets, Web3, blockchain, and the metaverse. IDEAS speaker Stephen Kaminsky, who leads strategic initiatives and special projects at Jump Crypto, discusses what to expect from the event amid crypto winter.

Since January 9th, 2009, when Bitcoin was quietly launched by its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, the technology spurred thousands of digital money projects, creating a vibrant and lucrative landscape for investors.

Investors now come in all sorts of flavors. What once was a small group of geeky believers is now a diverse crowd of people, from cypherpunks to big mainstream companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and large investment funds like Microstrategy.

The landscape for institutional crypto investors has been shifting recently, says Ajit Tripathi, a former investment banker at Barclays and Goldman Sachs and until recently head of institutional business at decentralized finance (DeFi) project Aave.

“I’ve been talking to some sovereign fund managers last week, and they have started making token investments,” Tripathi told CoinDesk in an interview. He said at least some of the funds managing the sovereign wealth of entire countries, have started taking baby steps into crypto beyond bitcoin.

Investments of this kind usually do not exceed 1% of such funds' total allocation, and the biggest part of it would be into bitcoin and crypto-exposed venture funds such as Pantera and a16z, among others. However, some of that allocation could also be invested in other, smaller cryptocurrencies.

“You can’t invest a hundred million dollars in a shit coin. So you would put half in bitcoin and ether, and the other half in venture funds, like Pantera and a16z, and a small part, as a learning exercise, in other tokens,” Tripathi said.

One of the crucial parts of the crypto market infrastructure is stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies that maintain a stable price by pegging the coin to an asset such as a fiat currency such as the USD dollar. The two biggest dollar-backed stablecoins are tether (USDT) and USDC.

Stablecoins might soon be challenged by central bank digital currencies (CBDC), according to Eswar Prasad, professor at Cornell University, a former International Monetary Fund (IMF) official and author of “The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance.”

“The emergence of CBDCs and the displacement of cash by CBDCs will almost certainly become the reality. We already see China, Japan, and Sweden central banks initiating experiments with CBDcs, and I suspect all of these economies will issue CBDCs in the next three to five years,” Prasad told CoinDesk.

Unlike the stablecoins running on decentralized permissionless ledgers such as Ethereum or Tron, central banks favor ecosystems they can control. So there is little chance the governments of the world will allow stablecoins to be on a par with CBDCs once the latter is in place, said John Kiff, former senior financial sector expert at the IMF.

All these trends do not mean the oldest and largest cryptocurrency by market cap has lost its attractiveness for investors. If anything, it is considered the benchmark of the crypto market, not as profitable as some other coins but not as precarious either.

“Bitcoin is kind of a reserve currency for the crypto market,” said Kiff. “I think of it almost like an index fund of the crypto market. It’s a good place to park my money when I’m not investing in anything specific.”

Bitcoin will most likely keep this status, especially “if it sticks to its roots, to the proof-of-work system, although we complain about it so much,”, of all cryptocurrencies, bitcoin remains the most decentralized.

At the time of publishing the price of BTC is USD 19136,04.  Rafael Vilagut, ravilagut@ymail.com is a digital entrepreneur, author, researcher, educator, trainer, and teacher. He lives and works between Caracas (Venezuela), Barcelona, and Madrid (Spain), and Central America (Costa Rica). LINK: https://linktr.ee/ravilagut