The Genesis of Crypto as Currency: The Great Recession

Toye Adeyemo
3 min readFeb 26, 2022

I find it interesting that the genesis of the cryptocurrency market started in 2009. At that time I was working at JP Morgan bank and got to see firsthand how the financial crisis now known as the Great Recession was affecting people’s lives. The “smartest” people in the world who controlled the world economy and banking system bet a whole lot of people’s lives and financial futures and the bet was wrong. Imagine a place where you give your savings, mortgage, retirement future to someone because they are the most educated, went to the “best” schools, and absolutely know better than you how to manage your money but then they risk it all and lose big!

The “Principle-Agent Dilemma” has always been at the forefront of the financial systems set up to keep certain people out and certain people rich. Then in 2009, there is a white paper proposing a new system, technology that gives all actors in the system a level of transparency that could not have been provided before. In fact, this new level of transparency gives all stakeholders not only insight into what is happening in the system but also incentivizes all actors to keep everyone honest. I don’t think the invention of Bitcoin and the introduction of it at the time where we needed it most was chance.

“The Bitcoin Network protocol is very similar to a central bank in that the “monetary policy” is like that of a nation-state that changes only when there is a majority consensus for a “software upgrade”. A “central bank smart contract” would be more adaptive in that the monetary policy is more stable” — Token Economy: How Web3 Reinvents the Internet

This is key in understanding how global economies work with economic advantages displayed in more advanced economies and developing economies where the advanced nations take advantage of the developing nations through currency manipulation and global trade tariffs, embargoes, and advantageous trade agreements.

Jamie Dimon did not want to embrace digital assets early on because he believed that the technology would not be able to take hold in mainstream financial markets. At the time after the 2008 banking crisis, the world came to save the banks. The banks were infallible. Interestingly enough that was the time that bitcoin paper dropped. So what was an initial dismissal of the power of a centralized monetary system slowly took hold once people began to realize that power of blockchain was primarily the power of economic wealth creation outside of the traditional banking system so much so that not only were regular people embracing the new technology but our elected officials began to take advantage of the new wealth generation system. Once the elected officials saw the power of the technology and the disintermediation that can occur without the traditional banking system they liked it.

Now in 2022 almost 13 years of the traditional banking systems ignoring, dismissing, and brushing away cryptocurrency they’re are looking to try and help create a policy that would enable them to keep control of the financial world system through “stable coin” issuance proposed by banking regulators(who are part of the traditional system of power) but now it is too late because our elected officials are not only educating themselves but also now users of the technology and they understand what it could mean to the developing ecosystem if we allow the traditional banks to try and influence and control the growth of the blockchain and crept currency ecosystem.

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Toye Adeyemo

Product Leader, Investor and Entrepreneur with a passion for Web3, Blockchain Policy, and Decentralized Finance. Consumer Web, Enterprise, Fintech, and APIs.