Aaron Brown, Columnist

Broader Crypto Circulation Getting Close to Reality

Some new developments may finally solve the question of how to distribute digital currencies and get people to use them.

August 29, 2019 at 1:30 PM UTC

By Aaron Brown

Aaron Brown is a former head of financial market research at AQR Capital Management. He is also an active crypto investor, and has venture capital investments and advisory ties with crypto firms. He is the author of the soon-to-be-released "Wrong Number."

Cryptocurrencies may soon rival traditional currencies.
Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

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Going by the mainstream business press, you’d think the big stories of 2019 in cryptocurrencies are the quadrupling of the price of Bitcoin and a shift by big institutions such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Facebook Inc. from the blockchain-not-bitcoin model popular from 2014 to 2018 to bitcoin-with-training-wheels.

If you read technology newsfeeds, you’d instead focus on new highs in network throughput, hashrate and gas prices—metrics that indicate cryptocurrency success in its own terms, rather than how traditional financial markets value that success. And perhaps even more exciting, bold new experiments about one of the oldest and most important questions in economics: how to get money to circulate?