The North Korean Love Triangle
What happens when you combine market competition with warfare?
Crypto companies are trapped in the North Korean Love Triangle.
On the one hand, as a crypto company you are engaged in market competition with other crypto companies. Failure to compete can result in business failure.
On the other hand, as a crypto company you are also engaged in de facto warfare with North Korea. The military of the sovereign nation-state of North Korea engages in coercive violence in order to pursue their geopolitical objectives. The common English word for this is warfare.
North Korea wages undeclared war on private sector crypto companies. That means you must engage in the military defense of your company.
This puts crypto companies in a trilemna. If you optimize for market competition but fail to account for active adversaries like North Korea on the cyber domain, then any business you build can disappear in an instant. Beating your market competition means nothing if you get hacked and North Korea steals all of your funds and your customers’ funds.
But if you optimize for security against North Korea, then you find yourself at a disadvantage in the market. Companies prepared to take insane risks will beat you to market. And while the risk of getting popped by North Korea is extremely high, it is not a guarantee. North Korea are shooting fish in a barrel, but you might still get lucky, who knows?
This means that you are trapped in the North Korean Love Triangle, and how you handle this trilemna will determine the success or failure of your crypto company.
Most business folks correctly perceive and understand market risk. How can we beat the competition to market? How can we close business deals? How can we achieve brand presence? How can we dominate mindshare among our customers and potential customers?
But business people regularly fail to appreciate the cybersecurity risk. Cybersecurity risk is no easier to quantitatively measure than market risk—both require elements of art and strategy to be successful—but when you don’t understand the risk, it’s easy to dismiss risk. Especially invisible risk.
Crypto companies are trapped in the North Korean Love Triangle. This explains a great deal of the otherwise irrational business activity we see in the crypto/web3 space.
And for crypto companies, grappling with this trilemna is an opportunity to better balance opportunity as well as risk.
Because failure to address the trilemna is a recipe for either getting rekt or failing in the market—and the end result for any company is the same.