David Marcus, advocate of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, thinks there is more pain to come in 2023 as market tries to recover from bad actors.  David Marcus is the CEO and co-founder of Lightspark, and ran Payments/Crypto and Messenger at Meta. He also led PayPal, and has built three startups. On Friday he published his thoughts for the future in a Medium article. Recession plus obsolete workforces The experienced executive is not bullish in the short to medium term on the economy nor on crypto. He thinks that a full-blown recession is approaching, probably caused by the Federal Reserve raising rates as they seek to tame inflation. He believes that large tech companies are going to realise that they can cut their workforces drastically, and do more with few people. He thinks that AI will “see the beginning of a Cambrian explosion”, that will serve to automate many work areas, and also lead to human obsoletion across many industries. Crypto will recover As for crypto, he is of the opinion that the sector will need a couple of years to recover from the bad actors that have plagued it. He thinks that regulation will need time to be responsibly developed and implemented. He sees a sea change in crypto and states: “In crypto, years of greed will make room for real-world applications. The years of creating a token out of thin air and making millions are over. The music has stopped. We’re back to our regular programming of having to create real value and solving real world problems.” In the solving of these problems he expects to see: “key innovations in the areas of payments, asset securitization, DeFi, zero-knowledge applications including proof of reserves and layer 1 scaling solutions, and a renewed development energy and interest on the Bitcoin network.” Sceptical on regulation Once more on regulation, Marcus is not very hopeful that the regulators will get it right. He believes that new regulation is necessary for digital assets and crypto, contrary to the belief of Gary Gensler, chair of the SEC, who believes that crypto must be shoehorned into existing regulation. He says: “Sadly, I’ve become increasingly skeptical of our ability to reach consensus on legislative or regulatory approaches that achieve the right balance in these areas. I think we will therefore see more of the same in 2023 with increased responsibility on leaders of industries to do what they believe is right in the vacuum left by our deadlocked legislative system.” However, he is of the firm belief that “destruction comes with an opportunity to rebuild anew”, and that despite an extremely challenging environment, digital assets and crypto will come out of this next period stronger and better. Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.