Words matter. These are the best William Mougayar Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A new DAO is like a startup. It requires a product/market fit, business model realization, and a lot of users/customers.
You have to think of the blockchain as a new utility. It is a new utility network for moving value, moving assets.
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.
The blockchain symbolizes a shift in power from the centers to the edges of the networks.
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 old question ‘Is it in the database?’ will be replaced by ‘Is it on the blockchain?’
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.
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.
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.
ICOs cannot escape startup evolution characteristics. This means that their growth will be hard fought, hard earned, and hardly a walk in the park.
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.
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.
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.
As much as one would like to think that what China does doesn’t matter, the reality is that when China sneezes at crypto, the rest of the world catches the cold.
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.
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.
How do we create new value? You create value by running services on the blockchain.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When (not if) regulators start looking at ICO deals they might want to investigate, they will likely start with the ones that exhibit weaknesses.
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 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.
In the blockchain world, each user can and should own their data, and ‘central’ players are less vulnerable to data losses and breaches.
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.
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.
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.
