Following on from last week’s post about my personal career path, I have been reflecting on my 10-year experience of working in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry.

Using the analogy of dog years, in crypto years, that’s more like half a century.

I sometimes joke about it with colleagues and clients, but the more you consider the pace of development in the crypto sector, the less of a joke it becomes.

In most industries, change happens over decades (yes, I know AI is now evolving at a rapid rate, but it has taken many years of earlier development to achieve this current momentum).

Regulations shift slowly, new asset classes take years to achieve legitimacy, and institutions move stolidly.

In crypto, that same volume of change happens in 12 months.

Consider what this industry has lived through in the last decade alone:

1. For me personally, Bitcoin went from being a “curiosity” at a Melbourne pitch night to a reserve asset held by sovereign nations.
2. Ethereum has introduced programmable money.
3. The ICO boom of 2017-19 upended the way companies and capital form around new technology, innovation and business ideas.
4. The cycle of market booms and crashes.
5. The DeFi experiment/explosion.
6. NFTs and RWA tokenisation.
7. The FTX collapse.
8. ETF approvals.
9. And now stablecoins and tokenised assets being quietly adopted by the very banks that once dismissed crypto entirely.

Every one of these reshaped how the industry operates at ground level.

Everything traditional finance systems took decades to build (price discovery, benchmarking, asset origination, financial structuring, risk management, clearing & settlement), crypto is rebuilding faster than ever.

After 10 years, I’m still not totally comfortable with al aspects of this constant rate of change, but I am a little better at reading it.

How do you keep up when your industry moves fast?

Next week: Three things that cryptocurrency isn’t

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My thanks to Simian Giria for helping to initiate this topic.