Hi everyone I'm Maréresca Santillana. I'm a reporter here at Forbes on the

Digital Assets team and I'm here today with Nina Be Micheva and my colleague to

talk about the story that we wrote about the myth of decentralization in the

crypto industry. So let's start from the bare bones mean up. What is

decentralization? Perfect beginning for this. I think we really have to go back here to how this trillion

dollar industry started with of course the Toshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin White Paper, where he outlined this idea for a

peer-to-peer payment system without the traditional middleman like banks or brokers and it's been 15 years since then now we have

thousands of decentralized applications on top of multiple blockchains, hundreds of

cryptocurrencies. There is all this exciting technology, but at the same time,

many of these applications don't have mainstream adoption, right?

And especially in the past year we saw a lot of scandals and bankruptcies within crypto. Of course, of course people will draw the line between the companies that failed and

decentralized components of it and I think it adds to the conversation but also makes it very complicated.

So I'm excited to talk to you about all of those components and moving parts. I think the simple answer is that I would love to quote one of our sources and this is something we heard from I think multiple people as we were doing this story

decentralization is a means not an end in itself.

So to kind of unwrap it a little bit. It's a way for a lot of these projects to build

you know the new internet new financial system that's at least that's the goal yeah

I think it's interesting that point to right of like it's a process and I think

the perfect example which we talk about in our story is this decentralized autonomous

organization Aragon which started out you know as a couple of founders with the

project with the idea of like hey pretty lofty goals honestly like we're going

to start this like decentralized almost to go

this like decentralized almost court and legal system where you know we'll have

...