Chris O’Brien moderated a panel, “Rising Waves of Innovation: Blockchain’s Trailblazing Journey Beyond Finance,” at Benzinga’s Future of Digital Assets Conference. The conference, held in New York City in November, was billed as “the biggest gathering of digital asset companies and institutional investors.”
In an interview after his panel, O’Brien said it had been a “wild ride” since Venable took on its first crypto client in 2016, and that the conviction of FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried earlier in November “harkened the end of the beginning of crypto. Not the end of the industry, [and] certainly not the end of the technology, but the end of the beginning.”
Asked about what investors should be aware of in the crypto industry in coming years, O’Brien said they should “focus on providing real world solutions…using the technology. Not focusing on floating a coin that’s going to make you rich.”
The next chapter “of people actually using this technology to solve real world problems, [to] make people’s lives better…will naturally create the demand for the products and the services,” he said.