At Consensus 2023, I experienced two embarrassing incidents that made me reflect on why I have stayed in the blockchain industry for so long. As Galen Moore, global communications lead at Axelar, I was able to learn from these experiences and gain a better understanding of the importance of transacting with minimal information.
In an interview with Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson, she said that bitcoin is a “distraction” from the “greatest disruption,” blockchain. I disagreed with her statement, as “bitcoin exists, [allowing] me to transact globally with anyone over the internet, exchanging a minimal amount of information”, as the cypherpunks first questioned the commercial direction of the internet in 1993.
At the Axelar and Dragonfly Capital party, I made some bad decisions and ended up leaving my state-issued ID with a bartender. When I arrived at the airport, I was faced with the challenge of getting on the plane without proving my identity. This experience made me realize that “you don’t have to prove who you are to go through the customs equivalent (validators) on a decentralized cross-chain connector like Axelar”.
The hype surrounding blockchain has surpassed the use cases, but for those of us who believe that the ability to transact with minimal information will be an important part of the internet, it is worth working on for the long-term.