Beeple, for example, caused a sensation last year when an NFT of his artwork sold for $69 million at Christie’s. NFTs have exploded in 2022, conjuring a $41 billion market seemingly out of thin air. Blockchain is now being deployed to new ends: for instance, to create “digital deed” ownership records of unique digital objects - or nonfungible tokens. The underlying technology, blockchain, is what’s called a “distributed ledger” - a database hosted by a network of computers instead of a single server - that offers users an immutable and transparent way to store information.

Thomas Stackpole is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.Ĭrypto, however, is just the tip of the spear. What was first a curiosity and then a speculative niche has become big business. Until suddenly Larry David was pitching them during the Super Bowl stars like Paris Hilton, Tom Brady, and Jamie Foxx were hawking them in ads and a frankly terrifying Wall Street–inspired robot bull celebrating cryptocurrency was unveiled in Miami. Amidst all the demands on our attention, many of us didn’t notice cryptocurrencies slowly seeping into the mainstream.

Bitcoin never had a future alongside real tech companies, they’d contend, and then they’d forget about it and move on with their lives.īitcoin now seems to be everywhere. Each time it does, skeptics rush to dismiss it as dead, railing that it was always a scam for nerds and crooks and was nothing more than a fringe curiosity pushed by techno-libertarians and people who hate banks.

Every year or two, bitcoin’s value has tanked. Most likely, soon after Bitcoin came to your attention - whenever that may have been - there was a crash. Maybe you just wondered whether your company should be working on a crypto strategy in case it did take off in your industry, even if you didn’t really care one way about it or the other. Perhaps you felt a tingle of FOMO as the folks who got in early suddenly amassed a small fortune - even if it wasn’t clear what the “money” could legitimately be spent on (really expensive pizza?).

Do you remember the first time you heard about Bitcoin? Maybe it was a faint buzz about a new technology that would change everything.

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