This episode of The HASH is sponsored by BitStamp and the Galaxy Brains podcast.

You're listening to The Hash holiday special on the Coindess podcast network.

Hey there. I'm Zach Seward, host of The Hash, and I want to do a little year-end reflection.

It's kind of hard to get away from the FTX story.

That was just a massive, massive story this year, especially since it was kicked off by

some stellar reporting by CoinDesk's own Ian Allison.

So I got to focus in on that.

But even before that, I think there were cracks in the bull run that were starting

to be revealed. Danny Nelson had some really great reporting about Salana shenanigans on a couple

of developer brothers who were sort of masquerading as 10 to 12 people in an effort to juice

the TVL numbers of the Salana Defi ecosystem.

Stories like that, I think, that reveal sort of the inner workings of the crypto space

are really, really important in good times and bad. I think CoinDesk, to its credit, has done

it in both Bull and Bear. So for me, going forward, I think crypto getting back

to some of its on-chain roots, getting back to that decentralized ethos, getting away from

these middlemen that crypto believers really say they believe in is what it's going to be all

about in 2023, looking to build a more robust crypto economy

that's outside of some of these centralized intermediaries.

That's defy, that's self-custody,

that's new experiments for onboarding people

directly to on-chain applications

rather than these big exchanges

...