What could you see if you collected as much blockchain data as you can find, and knew how to read it?
That’s the question Kristina Bruhahn, CEO and founder of Continuum.Market has been trying to answer. The data analyst and her team are trying to persuade Web3 firms to share their stories with her platform, enabling customers, the blockchain industry, Wall Street, and Capitol Hill to gain a clearer understanding of the growth of Web3.
You can think of it as bringing blockchain transparency to blockchain brands.
The aim is to build the kind of trust that will smooth take-up and investment, and also help legislators produce regulations that aid the industry without stifling its growth.
But as companies sign up and share their stories publicly, they’re also sharing data points. For someone like Kristina Bruhahn, who has a 15-year data background in the Fortune 500, that’s a valuable opportunity to read some runes.
Talking to the Bad Crypto Podcast recently, without giving trading advice, she explained what she saw. It wasn’t good.
In the short term, the fallout from the FTX scandal is going to continue, generating a domino effect, she predicted. “I’m under NDA for too many brands,” she told the podcast. “So I’m aware of… other centralized exchanges that are in the exact same boat.”
The collapse of FTX, Bruhahn continued, is probably the worst thing that’s ever happened in the industry because Bankman-Fried was seen as the golden boy of regulation. “He was in talks with the SEC, which means how did the SEC not see this?”
The pressure on cryptocurrencies will grow as the economy shrinks. Continuum has been predicting a global economic recession for more than four years and now expects the impact of rising interest rates to hit in the first quarter of next year. Although the consumer and institutional credit crunch should start to level out by the second half of 2023, a bear market generally lasts about 270 days, she warns. And her analysts predict the coming recession will be worse than the one that started in 2008.
“It will reset the value of the dollar. Now if the dollar is getting reset, everything is getting reset…. The price of meat, agriculture, energy, precious metals, all the things that make the world go round is all going to get reset based on supply and demand.”
In theory, that should mean that Bitcoin holders are sitting pretty but Bruhahn has some bad news for them too. Bitcoin will not be seen as a store of value, she predicts. The price could fall below $10,000 and when the recession really kicks in, could drop to $3,500 and even lower.
“This is about value. When it gets so low—when there’s blood in the streets—that people go ‘I’ll buy that,’ that’s where you start to see that the tides change. But that won’t happen until the massive slide happens.”
There was some good news though. Bruhahn also imagined a legislative process that incorporates the transparency of Web3 that Continuum is trying to build.
“I have a vision in the next decade of blockchain voting, of being able to have insight into bills and things that are on the floor and actually hold your elected officials accountable,” she said. “That you’re not just voting them out every two years, but you’re actually working with them to understand the landscape.”
We just might have to pass through a crash, a recession, and a Bitcoin bloodbath to get there.