Joshua Henslee: Why Binance SEC lawsuit doesn’t matter and his thoughts on the London Blockchain Conference

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Blockchain developer and thought leader Joshua Henslee recently shared his thoughts on the London Blockchain Conference and why the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s lawsuit against Binance doesn’t matter.

The London Blockchain Conference

Henslee opens the video by saying he was happy to see lots of people in the BSV blockchain ecosystem again, and he was happy to get the opportunity to travel again after a tumultuous few years.

The London Blockchain Conference itself was great, Henslee says. He had lots of great conversations and met a lot of new people as well as old ones.

Comparing the London Blockchain Conference to the CoinGeek Conference three years ago, Henslee notes that this one “blew it out of the water” regarding attendance. Some 1,600 people attended on Day 1, and unique attendees were over 3,000 for the three days. This is partly due to the rebranding of the London Blockchain Conference, which he thinks was a brilliant marketing move.

Henslee also tried to gauge how many people at the conference understood Ordinals. He doesn’t think that many people got it, and he thought that people fit into three categories: didn’t know about it, heard of it and hadn’t looked into it, and heard of it but thought it was just another ‘crypto’ bubble.

The Binance debacle

Pivoting to the second topic of this video, Henslee says that he was out closing on a house when he noticed the digital currency markets had dumped. He later saw that the SEC was suing Binance and Changpeng Zhao and connected the dots.

Henslee didn’t even read the story and doesn’t care about the details. He says that the fact everyone was selling on the news means there’s mass confusion in the market. He doesn’t believe it matters and will only impact those holding interest-bearing proof-of-stake tokens. However, those who are trading on-chain don’t have anything to worry about.

“We cannot imagine who is going to do what on this layer,” Henslee says, reemphasizing his point that Ordinals represent a permanent change of great consequence. He highlights that people don’t get this and are still thinking this is like the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) bubbles.

How does this tie into Binance? All of the innovation with BRC-20 tokens and Ordinals happened without Binance or trusted intermediaries like them. “Binance hasn’t done anything,” he says, pointing out that it’s users who are behind this stuff. It’s trial and error, and that’s how Henslee thinks it should be.

“We’re not going back to this Tether-manipulated, debt-enabled system,” Henslee says. We’re going back to Bitcoin, and there’s no chance of getting rugged since it’s an on-chain cash system. Henslee believes BTC will increase the block size even though most people don’t see it because of the money that has been invested. The more money that flows into Ordinals and BRC-20s, the more pressure there will be to do that.

Henslee reiterates that working on government and enterprise adoption is a waste of time for now. He thinks this will come last after the innovation created by users. He thinks BSVers need to get on the same page; we have to make stuff that people want to make this a success.

Key takeaways from this Joshua Henslee video

• Henslee enjoyed the London Blockchain Conference and said the number of attendees blew the last in-person conference away. He is energized and reinvigorated as a result of attending.
• He doesn’t believe Binance being sued by the SEC matters to the industry at all. It only matters to those holding interest-bearing proof of stake coins. He doesn’t see centralized players like Binance as relevant in the grand scheme of things.
• Henslee believes Ordinals represent a permanent change. He says we can’t imagine what’s going to be built on-chain. However, he believes growth will come organically from users and not from enterprises and governments.
• In his view, there’s no going back now. The future is on-chain, and players like Binance will become irrelevant. He calls on BSVers to come together and seize the moment; build what people want, and they will come.

Watch Joshua Henslee: Every significant metric is positive for BSV