The Signal app creator is just one influential expert slamming crypto tech — and investors have taken notice

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The technology behind cryptocurrencies has come under savage criticism from several high-profile tech bloggers in recent weeks — and investors are sitting up and taking notice.

Swiss bank UBS highlighted a blog post by Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of encrypted-messaging app Signal, in a note to clients last week. It also flagged recent critical comments from other well-known tech experts, as it considered the case for a sharp fall in crypto prices.

Marlinspike argued that the crypto world is in fact far from decentralized and secure, despite what its supporters say. Instead, hugely powerful entities — such as NFT marketplace OpenSea — dominate access to the crypto-sphere, he said.

Marlinspike took aim at the idea of decentralized crypto technology itself, saying people don't want to run their own servers, and that it's too difficult to upgrade.

He said many supposed crypto fans don't really care about decentralization, they're simply chasing after money in what he called a «gold rush».

Decentralized systems share out the activity needed to complete a process, rather than relying on a single central resource to do the work. In cryptocurrencies, the distributed work is tracked on a blockchain.

The lightning network that underpins El Salvador and Twitter's bitcoin payments is predominantly run by people who manage individual channels and nodes, for instance.

The Signal founder's intervention was widely shared in technology and financial circles. But it was just one of a number of recent posts by technology commentators who have taken crypto to task.

«The easy money to be made speculating on crypto assets seems to have distracted developers and investors from the hard work of building useful real-world