Isaiah 44:22 “Return to me, for I have redeemed you.”
For the last few days I’ve been roaming around NFT LA, a conference full of thousands of crypto fanatics and creatives. Speakers included Andrew Yang, Steve Aoki, Macy Gray, Charlie Sheen, Mark Cuban, and a whole bunch of others. A friend of mine recently said to me that he’d been skeptical about crypto for a long time. “But now I’m convinced it’s here to stay. There are too many smart people spending too much time building too many cool products for this whole thing to go away.” I would tend to agree, and I think the NFT craze of last year helped propel crypto and blockchain technology to a much broader audience through pop culture.
More than once during the conference, I saw something that looked spiritual. One of the display booths said “PRAISE”, and I half expected to see a Hillsong NFT. Upon further inspection it had nothing to do with worship music at all. Another sign advertised “FAITH TRIBE”, which ended up being a very much secular (and decentralized) fashion line. Crypto is a movement that mimics a lot of spiritual overtones, so on one hand these headfakes are somewhat expected. But I know that some religious leaders might point out that crypto distracts people from what’s really important. I don’t entirely disagree, but the same could be said about lots of good things like food, or education, or even ministry itself.
While God can call us to seasons of fasting, I don’t think the distractive nature of crypto (or food, or any other good thing) requires us to disengage from these activities entirely. My personal belief is that God is already in crypto, just as he’s in great food and great art and the whole world besides. He’s already won the battle, so my role is just to come into alignment with what He’s ALREADY done. And for me, in this space, a big part of that is furthering the dialogue and helping more believers get involved in this space.
So I’ve been blessed to come and share about “God & Crypto” on April 16th at 10am Singapore time at Digital Mission Ventures. I’d like to thank SC Lim from DMV for organizing. I’ll also be joining two other panelists who are the real experts here. Jason Lee is the COO of the Algorand Foundation, and Broderick Elisha is the Founder of Mission Dao. Encourage all who are able to join us!
Lord, thank you for blessing us with this amazing world you have created. Sometimes it’s so good that we get distracted and forget where it came from. Sometimes we get so focused on the gift, we forget about the giver. But we thank you for redeeming us and every nook and cranny of this fallen world that we call home. In your son’s name, Amen.
