Despite crypto crashes, the blockchain industry is still growing

Last year the crypto market saw crashes, bankruptcies and a manhunt, but blockchain has been steady and growing quietly in the background.

Lachlan Feeney, CEO and founder at Labrys Australia spoke to Digital Nation Australia about how the industry is growing from strength to strength.

He said the blockchain industry is not as frenzied at the moment, compared to 12 months ago.

“It was in about May last year when things in the industry took a little bit of a turn for the worse,” he explained.

“Certainly now, things are a little bit more subdued, at least from the public's perspective. What the public doesn't see is that there's still a ton of stuff happening in the industry.”

He explained regardless of what the price of Bitcoin is doing, these technologies can run and operate and still provide that economic value.

“The applications that are running on blockchain, can still provide the same value today that they did 12 months ago,” Feeney said.

However, he highlighted the challenge that blockchain faces.

“When you have a lot of titans within the industry that get caught up in all of these scandals, FTX being the biggest one of those allegedly committing billions of dollars in fraud,” he said.

“This has enormous consequences for the industry as a whole, from the perspective of confidence, and access to capital. Access to capital is much harder to come by in the industry. That limits how much R&D can happen and how quickly it can happen.”

He said with that lack of confidence, people can move away from investing in the industry. However, Feeney explained that these blockchain companies weren’t suffering during these economic downturns.

“Most of these blockchain companies as well were making an absolute killing in the peak of the market as well. So, it evens itself out a little bit,” he added.

Feeney explained that there's still tons of solutions being developed during this “quiet period”.

“Yes, it's a little bit quieter in the space, but that's almost been a good thing as well because it allows us to put our heads down and focus on building good technology,” he added.

There is a nuance with blockchain, which is important to appreciate, Feeney explained.

“Blockchain is this exciting, valuable technology where we can essentially create permissionless networks for individuals, companies, and everyone far and in between to interact between one another,” he said.

“We can create these amazing companies and business relationships and these things on technologies.”

New technology

Feeney said there are two new features emerging out of the blockchain space, scalability and account obstruction.

He explained, “They haven't made their way into the mainstream just yet, but these, these are going to be exciting things for blockchain industry. Probably over the next 12 months or next 24 months.

Zero Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (ZKEVM) are scaling solutions that can make blockchain networks substantially more scalable than say they were 12 months ago, he explained.

“A week or two ago, we started rolling out the industry started rolling out these systems,” he said.

The other one is account abstraction, Feeney said.

“This is all about getting rid of private keys, crypto wallet and making your interaction with the blockchain look like your banking app. These are going to bear fruit over the next few years to lower barriers to entry,” he ended.