If blockchain technologies ignore the eventuality of standards, we are going to see less adoption. Maybe we should think of the blockchain as a public-good utility and encourage an evolution that is not unlike the Internet's in terms of openness and neutrality of access.
— William Mougayar
Most blockchain platforms don't share that much in common, resulting in choice lock-ins, lack of interoperability, and potentially dead-ends that are hard to untangle.
A blockchain-based startup could have a product/service as part of what they are developing, but their stride is best hit when they are also creating a self-sustaining circular economy that is supported by their own currency or tokens and where there is a transactional loop between earning and spending these tokens within their ecosystem.
A token is not a short term carrot, nor a stick for that matter. Just having a token doesn't mean that you have a working business model attached with it.
How do we create new value? You create value by running services on the blockchain.
In the increasingly digital world, data is a valuable currency, yet as consumers, we control and own little of it. As consumers, we must ask what big companies do with our data, a question directed to both the online and traditional ones.
Crowdsourced funding via cryptocurrencies is a viable practice. A lot of good ideas and innovative companies are coming out of it. This segment is creating thousands of jobs and companies all over the world.
Few incumbents will succeed in deploying blockchain applications to enable new business models. The innovator's dilemma will prevail. Even if they aspire to, they must first get their feet wet within their business boundaries.
The blockchain applications market is unravelling along a segmentation of activity that is spread along two sets of variables: private vs. public blockchains, and new vs. existing business models.
Let's hope the Canadian public sector starts putting the blockchain on their agenda so we can see a significant difference in how government services are delivered.
The blockchain is an asset normalization platform that can enable a new liquidity in transactions, hence creating large networks of usage and value effects with benefits in speed, cost, quality, or outcomes.
If you have your own currency, you have your own governance, so each currency becomes their own mini-government. Mini-government is a big word, but it's a body that is governed in a decentralized manner where users have a say, where there's oversight and transparency.
Tokens should not be listed before the start of the operations on the network, platform, or application. This is where many ICO's seem to have lost their ways, and that's risky.
Owning a token bestows a right that results in product usage, a governance action, a given contribution, voting, or plain access to the product or market.
A new DAO is like a startup. It requires a product/market fit, business model realization, and a lot of users/customers.
Blockchain infiltration will be met with resistance because it is an extreme change.
There is a new economy out there, what I call the Crypto-Tech Economy, that could be as big, if not bigger, than the web economy. So we have to be prepared for it.
Conceivably, blockchains could rely on a number of standards above the Internet's existing standards to allow a smooth bridging from one layer to another. That would be a breakthrough.
I'm looking forward to seeing more ICO projects provide increased clarity about the performance metrics expectations they plan to exhibit during their future adult lives in addition to the assumptive utility of that token they are selling.
The token itself is not your new business model. What the token enables for you and for your users is the key part to focus on.
The blockchain symbolizes a shift in power from the centers to the edges of the networks.
What Bitcoin started is metamorphosing into something bigger: a 'crypto-tech'-driven economy with its own value creation, not unlike the Web's own economy. Welcome to the cryptoconomy.
In the blockchain world, each user can and should own their data, and 'central' players are less vulnerable to data losses and breaches.
Big companies do not want to disrupt themselves. All they want to do is improve themselves. They see the blockchain as another IT project. It's going to save money; it's going improve a process here and there. It's not going to change their business.
In my opinion, one of the most exciting potentials of the blockchain relate to creating new business models, whether in public or in private settings. In most of these cases, the new models don't care for incumbents because they are mostly on a disruption quest.
My advice to many ICOs is to start reading about startups and focus on the product, customer, and market as soon as the sale is over. And don't get distracted by post-ICO euphoria and the price of ETH or BTC.
Government leaders should get up to speed on the blockchain by understanding it first and committing to exploring its potential.
If you haven't used Bitcoin first-hand, you may not get the inherent advantage of a quicker appreciation and understanding of its potential. Seeing assets move swiftly without intermediaries is an eye opening experience, and that is just a starting point.
With the influx of available cryptocapital that has become widely accessible, it's going to be interesting to watch what happens next, because companies now have the luxury of raising enough money to build simultaneously a product, a company, and an ecosystem.
Ideally, it is important to communicate exactly when large amounts of tokens become unlocked and therefore available in public exchanges. It is a good practice to continuously update these exchanges with the right amount of tokens in circulation.
For the first time, companies can be their own payment processors without the cumbersome or costly aspects of traditional financial settlement options. Tokens offer a much lower barrier for processing end-to-end transactions inside a given market.
The world is preoccupied with dissecting, analyzing and prognosticating on the blockchain's future; technologists, entrepreneurs, and enterprises are wondering if it is to be considered vitamin or poison.
The blockchain cannot be described just as a revolution. It is a tsunami-like phenomenon, slowly advancing and gradually enveloping everything along its way by the force of its progression.
You have to think of the blockchain as a new utility. It is a new utility network for moving value, moving assets.
In order to grow-up, blockchains will eventually need a lot of standards that are vendor- and solutions-agnostic. So many areas are ripe for standards developments: smart contracts, tokens, security, storage, messaging, identities, naming, record-keeping, and more.
Until there are tangible metrics for quantifying the real value of a token's utility, the gap between value and valuation will continue to defy conventional wisdom and conventional valuation methods.
If your user base engagement is fledgeling, a token may not be the panacea unless it is properly threaded into the product, and user behavior is accompanying the token utility.
As we prepare to enter the cryptoconomy, undoubtedly it looks fuzzy, foggy, risky, buggy, uncertain and unproven, but so did the Internet in 1995.
An aftermath of real failures can make the whole blockchain ecosystem more resilient because it will result in revealing the boundaries and realities of what's possible, useful, absurd, impossible, repeatable, and scalable out of everything that appears plausible and innovative at the beginning.
Cryptocurrencies are not evil and are not for money launderers and scammers. They are for entrepreneurs, technologists, change-the-world dreamers, and anyone who believes they can (and will) enable new business models, new types of organizations, and new ways to service consumers and businesses alike.
The blockchain start-ups that have done ICOs are just at the beginning of something. Ask me how they are doing in a year or two years from now. I know for a fact it won't be any different from the statistics of all start-ups: 80% of them will not make it.
Public blockchains are almost like the public Internet, which is open and widely accessible. If you can get on the Internet, you will likely be able to get on a public blockchain via a specific application.
ICOs cannot escape startup evolution characteristics. This means that their growth will be hard fought, hard earned, and hardly a walk in the park.
Study how to write smart contracts, which is the basic unit of programming a blockchain for business purposes. It is the equivalent of being taught HTML and Java during the early Internet days. And master how to create assets or tokenize existing ones on a blockchain.
The blockchain is custom-made for decentralizing trust and exchanging assets without central intermediaries. With the decentralization of trust, we will be able to exchange anything we own and challenge existing trusted authorities and custodians that typically held the keys to accessing our assets or verifying their authenticity.
When (not if) regulators start looking at ICO deals they might want to investigate, they will likely start with the ones that exhibit weaknesses.
Many regulators are quick to apply existing compliance practices that treat tokens as a security, therefore elevating the barriers and costs of implementation for entrepreneurs.
Just like paying a toll to use a freeway, the token can be the pay-per-use rail for getting on the blockchain infrastructure or for using the product. This also ensures that users have skin in the game.
The old question 'Is it in the database?' will be replaced by 'Is it on the blockchain?'
I am very excited about the prospect of using cryptocurrency, not just as a money equivalent, but using it as a way to earn something as a result of doing some type of work.
