Attending my first Consensus last week, the largest annual event for the cryptocurrency community, I found myself overwhelmed. 8,500 people were squeezed into the New York Midtown Hilton and all they wanted to speak about was blockchain, tokens, crypto and the likes. Wandering the conference halls and speaking with countless crypto-enthusiasts a number of thoughts crossed my mind. I’m writing this because I want to share the overarching theme.
As a disclaimer, I’m new here. I bought my first cryptocurrency in September of 2017, didn’t discover Satoshi’s white paper in 2010 on Reddit, and until a few years ago, didn’t actually understand the difference between blockchain and bitcoin. But I think that is an advantage. I have somewhat of an outsider’s perspective into the echo chamber that cryptocurrency events and forums have become.
As I walked the halls of Consensus, I saw the same products repeating themselves. Cutting edge trading tools, next generation exchanges, future generation price insights. A debate actually broke out over whether “next generation” or “future generation” is more cutting edge. I don’t have a problem with marketing vernacular, I have a problem with pretending we’re creating new things when we’re not.
When I would tell people what VAYO.tech does, their first question was usually “what’s your token?”, “Where does it trade?”, “When’s your ICO?”. People didn’t know how to respond when I explained to them that we’ve built a SaaS product, that’s centrally sitting on AWS servers and we are raising money through equity, not a token sale.
The most bothersome thing is that the conversation would proceed to revolve around why a company in crypto would raise by equity and not issue a token. There was seldom any concern or inquiry into the product or business model. The conversations revolved around tokenization and trading of those future tokens.
Now, I’m not against tokenization. There are some very specific cases where it makes a lot of sense. But even in those cases, the conversation needs to revolve around products, not tokens; and that was missing at Consensus 2018.
The success of public blockchains and cryptocurrencies will be measured by the impact they can have on the end user; the user who doesn’t even know what blockchains are. Not by how much the total market cap has increased in the trailing twelve months. What products have we as a community created over the last 9 years that have actually had an impact on the average person’s life?
Crypto enthusiasts love to compare blockchain today to the internet in the 90’s. The verdict is still out on that comparison. The value of the internet didn’t come only from the best websites or most advanced communication protocols, it came from its ubiquity. It’s ability to integrate into every facet of society without anyone caring about “how it works”.
Blockchain is in its infancy, but the community needs to ask ourselves how we are going to bring real value to users and consumers globally. Not what next/future generation trading tools we can build to help trade assets. That’s how technology historians will measure the success or failure of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
