By TradeSmith Senior Crypto Analyst Joe Shew

On Oct. 31, 2008 — Halloween night — an anonymous revolutionary known only as Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page thesis that would forever change the course of history. It contained a narrative about putting more control in the hands of the people through a private alternative to the traditional financial system — one where folks could transact business on a person-to-person basis, effectively cutting banks and other third-party financial institutions out of the process altogether.

Though you won’t find the term “decentralization” anywhere in Nakamoto’s original whitepaper, it’s the ideal that sparked Bitcoin (BTC) and launched an entirely new asset class to overthrow the outdated and broken system fueled by the greed of those at the top. Decentralization was the ideal, anyway. But reality is never so black and white.

While cryptos themselves are decentralized, the industry itself has become reliant on heavily centralized exchanges to facilitate those transactions – only to see those exchanges fail time and time again. There was Mt. Gox in 2014, which “lost” $473 million worth of Bitcoin… QuadrigaCX in 2018, whose founder died and took $190 million of his customers’ assets with him… Cryptopia in 2019, which went under with $17 million unaccounted for… The list of centralized exchange failures goes on and on.

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Of course, none of those epic blunders even came close to the latest disaster. You know… the one where $8 billion in customer funds went missing? “The Great FTX Collapse of 2022” underscored a massive problem with crypto’s centralized exchanges that disillusioned investors for the last time.

While centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance no doubt play a crucial role in facilitating crypto transactions and accelerating adoption, effectively functioning as an easier “on-ramp” for new crypto users, they will always have a crucial weakness…Until you move your crypto into your own possession (in a hardware wallet), they control your assets.

The good news is that there’s a solution that cuts out the middleman altogether — and it’s one that can make you money.

I’m talking about a kind of exchange that has no central authority, where you’re always in control of your money, where you never have to leave your crypto exposed in someone else’s possession — heck, you don’t even have to share your private data to use it.

Many of these exchanges have been around for years. But it wasn’t until the spectacular insolvency and mismanagement of FTX that they started to become enormously appealing to a wider audience.

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Today, I’m giving you a sneak peek into another sector that I believe will create huge opportunity for savvy investors in 2023:

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The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.


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