The disruption of supply chains across the globe due to the Coronavirus pandemic has resulted in substantial upheaval and its effect was also felt by China-based miners. The drop in Bitcoin’s hash rate was also speculated to have been influenced by COVID-19.
Wu Tong, the Deputy Director of the CECBC Blockchain Special Committee of the Ministry of Commerce reportedly stated,
“Under the influence of the pandemic, the difficulty of maintaining, updating, and continuing production of mining machines has further increased, and the price plunge has left many mining machines on sale. The mining machine sales has occurred, and the average selling price of each mining machine is 30% -50% lower than before the Spring Festival.”
While working remotely and adapting to this new global environment is not a piece of cake, nevertheless, in the face of a crisis, firms around the world have been forced to move large portions of their operations to online work. Unlike many other industries, crypto companies are actually better suited to function in a distributed and decentralized manner.
In a recent podcast, Andy Bromberg is the CEO of CoinList stated,
“From a philosophical lens, people building crypto companies are proponents of decentralization. Decentralization is a paradigm, for everyone, that perhaps some systems can be more effective when they are decentralized, when they are distributed and when they work by encouraging collaboration of disparate set of entities instead of mandating it from a central authority.”
Bromberg went on to underscore how most crypto platforms are distributed, be it working with investors, issuers across the globe, meetings, and calls at odd hours from people from different time zones are all a vital part of this industry. According to the CoinList executive, crypto companies on a very practical level are pandemic proof or pandemic resistant.
While talking about distributed and decentralized systems, one of the most important distinguishable features is the difference between stock exchanges and crypto exchanges in terms of operation timings. Cryptocurrency exchanges operate 24/7, unlike traditional stock exchanges where trading is restricted to business hours. With crypto exchanges, anyone can trade in cryptocurrencies whenever they please.
Moreover, at a time, when Coronvirus has triggered layoffs across various sectors and capacity cuts seem like a very obvious choice for corporates, popular crypto platforms are on a hiring spree. While other companies are struggling to stay afloat, crypto jobs on LinkedIn for platforms such as Kraken, Binance, and Coinbase noted an uptick.
