RockAndSage
WKR
Bitcoin's perceived utility is privacy, security, and its inability to be devalued by government fiat - but it doesn't have any more inherent value than our own paper money. It is only perceived value shared by enough people that makes it valuable.
That is absolutely not the case with an entirely different category of crypto, called Utility Tokens. The entire financial system is currently being converted over to the "rails" these crypto are built around. There are only a handful of genuinely viable utility cryptos out there, with XRP, XLM, HBAR, Chainlink, and Solana being some of the top. Bitcoin somewhat proved the concept of crypto as digital, secure currency, but it's also old technology compared to most of the utility cryptos.
If it's of interest, part of what's necessary to understand all this is that any given "crypto" is actually two things: a distributed digital ledger that all the accounting and security is done around, and the token itself, which is the medium of exchange and the actual store of value on that ledger.
It's also critical to understand that we're not just talking money - you can "tokenize" anything, from house titles to stocks to gold to derivatives, putting it on that accounting ledger and using that ledger's token to exchange the value.
It's saves immense amounts of money and time, in avoiding the way currency exchanges and the accounting of all this is done right now.
Again, the entire financial system globally is converting over to these utilities, right now.
Here's an example:
When you buy stock shares, that gets recorded by several parties - buyer and seller, right? But what about there being a neutral third-party that it all gets reported to, to keep everyone safe and above-board? Both accounting for ownership, but also protecting ownership, so that someone can't steal your stocks by grabbing them out from under your bed or chest or wherever people used to keep stock shares 150 years ago.
One of those places in the US is called the DTCC. Think of it as the clearing house where all stocks and securities are stored, with literally manual ledgers being kept for ages as billions of shares are bought and sold by millions of parties.
That manual process is safe, but it's literally the only reason the stock markets are only open a few hours a day, and only 5 days a week. They need to keep track of all the paperwork. The volume of those few hours of trading equals 2-3x the amount of time needed in paperwork.
DTCC just adopted XLM to do this all instantly, a few weeks ago. After experimenting with it and a few others for almost 10 years. And for the near term, it's allowing everyone to go to 24/5 trading, and likely 24/7 trading eventually.
BTC will have value as long as people think it does. But these utility tokens are like buying chunks of the electrical grid or the railways - the entire financial world is getting its equivalent of the steam engine, internal combustion engine, and electrification, all at once.
The fact that most of these utility cryptos are a fixed supply, means that as that demand comes online over just the next couple of years, some of them are going to absolutely explode in value as institutions need them more. There are vast sums of time and money being saved and unlocked by these institutions converting to this system.
