Genesis
Response
Penultimate
April 26th, 2021
If you want to participate in online discussions, you might turn to Reddit or Twitter. If you see a promotion for a really cool game, you might buy that game with your Steam account. If you want to chat with friends you met in that game, maybe you’ll make a Discord server. Each time you sign up on one of these platforms, you’ll be prompted for a username and avatar.
In today’s digital age, you probably have multiple identities. The first is your identity in the physical universe. This identity has childhood friends, classmates, and maybe coworkers. It’s yours from the day you were born to the day that you die.
But the others? They are the anonymous identities born in the metaverse. They are the personalities that your Twitter followers have come to know and love. They are the friends that your guild members raid with. They free you from the pigeonhole that your physical identity is stuck in because they’re a blank canvas and you’re the artist.
There aren’t many professions where a digital identity takes precedence over a physical identity. An anonymous actor or lawyer or engineer probably wouldn’t get very far in their fields. However, crypto is different. Crypto is already in the metaverse.
Take a look through crypto Twitter and you’ll find that there are plenty of anon accounts with dedicated followings. These accounts all started from nothing and have built a brand around their digital identities. It’s possible that for some of them, managing that brand is their full-time job.
Similarly, only in crypto can you find investment funds run by anons. For several months, the founders of Metapurse, the fund which purchased the $69M Beeple NFT, were completely anonymous. Of course, they did reveal their identities shortly thereafter, but even then the inversion of the order of precedence was clear. The founders’ physical identities took a backseat to the digital identities that they had built.
Finally, what discussion on anonymity would be complete without mentioning the inventors and founders? Not only is the physical identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin, still unknown to this day, but plenty of projects launch on Ethereum with a completely anonymous team. These projects are not only accepted, but welcomed, by the community.
Crypto is unique because its community has embraced anonymity, but the rest of the world hasn’t quite gotten there yet. As crypto becomes more mainstream, it has a chance to introduce the metaverse and anonymity to the wider population in a big way. In a sense, anonymity in crypto has never mattered more than now.
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