The next phase of blockchain: consumer adoption
I believe that we are at the threshold of something really unique, a mass market adoption of blockchain technology in the same way that the browser gained mass traction in 1995, and the iPhone/app ecosystem in 2007.
This is absolutely a contrary opinion.
Up until a few months ago, it seemed like blockchain had a very limited market: the crypto "underworld" of silk road / anonymous money transfers / highly technical academic experiments.
Sure, Bitcoin had gone up, and then down, but nobody in America was doing much with it other than speculating, casino-style, on where it was going next. Sure, a lot has been written about Ethereum, and how a 24 year old programmer had come up with the new, new thing.
But nobody was using Bitcoin, or Ethereum in real life. There were, and there are, no bitcoin apps or ethereum apps in the app store or Google Play store with any actual daily usage. The site https://dappradar.com monitors activity. The main point is there is, essentially none.
A few games, a few decentralized exchanges make up the top Ether apps. None have more than 10,000 daily users. The Bancor exchange, which raised over 100 million users has 345 daily users. Cryptokitties, which once brought ETH to its knees with just 14,000 daily users has even less.
These numbers should really give investors pause. How is it possible that over 300 billion dollars of value has been invested in these ghost towns? Is Blockchain just another version of Bernie Madoff?
To be honest, the thought did cross my mind 4 months ago, as we attempted to build a consumer level freelance application on the blockchain. As we dove deep we started to appreciate the technical roadblocks inherent in the ETH ecosystem.
To begin with there is the transaction speed itself. Doing anything at all with the ETH blockchain involves waiting a minimum of 2 or 3 minutes. And it can take a lot longer. Transferring ETH from one address to another and getting 12 "confirmations" from the blockchain (required for transfer into most exchanges) can take 30 minutes or more.
Second there is the cost of transactions. Interacting with Blockchains is an expensive proposition, at least in the case of Ethereum. I've seen gas fees as high as $3 for a very simple transaction -- but even at 30 cents, that's a very high tax to pay for just interacting with an application.
Third there is the need for chrome plugins to interact with blockchain. You don't want to be entering your "private key" at every point in the UX; you need to save it encrypted somewhere. Metamask is the leading solution, but doesn't work on mobile and most people just don't get it.
And finally there is the account names, or, more precisely the lack of account names. In ETH, to do anything means typing an address like this into your app
0x1d814bb7fc50d2487229dcdb87e84676e631d0ac
In crypto parlance this is a "0x" address, and is somewhat a badge of honor. An ICO with the ticker ZRX is built around swapping these 0x tokens.
All these roadblocks put together mean that the repeat audience for crypto is at this point very, very small. But is it likely to stay small?
The answer, I submit, is no, and the reason is EOS. EOS, like Netscape is not the the first of it's class. EOS is the extension of Steem and Bitshares, two Dan Larimer projects, and many of the scaling ideas are shared by other projects, including Neo and Stellar. Netscape was also not the first browser. Mosaic, also coded by Marc Andreeson pre-dates Netscape. But both EOS and Netscape are "good enough".
EOS solves several of the key roadblocks that make ETH impractical for consumer applications:
- it's fast (2000 tps, although will need more within 12 months)
- it's cheap (no gas fees)
- it has the concept of user accounts (no long hashes)
With these three things you can start to build real apps. Things that real people can use. We've built arguably the first one with EOS Lynx. It's just a wallet, but it works 100x faster and is 10x easier to understand than any other wallet to this point. It's like venmo for crypto. And it's just the start. Our workcoin app, which is much more ambitious is no more difficult to use and just a few months away.
What all this tells me is that the dam has been broken. It is now possible to create consumer apps that use blockchain. For now that is EOS. Hopefully competition emerges (competition is always good), but for now this is the new OS.
When consumer adoption hits, it hits hard. Android, Instagram and WhatsApp all hit 1 billion users within 3 years. It's not crazy to think Crypto is going to follow a similar trajectory.
