Crypto industry and blockchain technology promise to drastically change established markets. However, the infrastructure of the crypto market is still very immature and need to be adapted to mass market to revolutionise the world.
Today many top experts and opinion leaders believe that the crypto world is the future of digital money and that blockchain, as a decentralised technology, brings huge challenges to the global economy. Redesigning the money and ownership processes, and redesigning the role of intermediaries.
Carlos Domingo, co-founder and managing partner of SPiCE VC and co-founder and chairman of Securitize clarifies, that this new Internet of value is similar to what Skype and WhatsApp did to revolutionise the world of voice and messaging – disintermediating the telcos. However, no one can predict whether Bitcoin might be the Altavista of the Web, and someone like Google will come in and become the leader in cryptocurrency.
It’s worth mentioning that the infrastructure of the crypto market is still very immature. It displays a lack of stability and a need to be adapted to mass market requirements. Andrew Zimine, CEO of Exscudo notes, “The biggest challenge for the crypto market is definitely its mass adoption. At some point in time a critical mass of users will use it to transfer and store value, and by this point, blockchains should have become so fast and productive that they withstand high loads similar to Visa and MasterCard, and even more.”
“There is certainly a lot of interest in crypto but its adoption is still low in comparison to traditional currency and will take some time for the wider population to accept crypto as a mainstream currency,” Eagle An, Co-Founder of MiCai comments. “The good thing is people are starting to pay attention to the bene ts that crypto can provide to the global economy.”
Barry Hayut, CEO and Co-Founder of Hayver, notes that immature infrastructure and instability makes crypto blockchain a poor choice for regular commerce and business transactions. Until they become more stable and predictable, their widespread use will be hampered. “The blockchain platforms are neither efficient nor scalable enough to run business-to-consumer solutions on a grand scale. In addition, the various blockchain networks are working in silos, and cross-blockchain traffic and solutions are still in their infancy. Once the user interface improves significantly, together with a seamless cross-blockchain interaction, it will propel widespread adoption by users for everyday transactions.” It’s very important to be competitive with alternative forms of centralised transactional infrastructure, Dan Gailey, the CEO of Synapse AI, adds.
The technology itself faces many limitations, including energy consumption, a tendency towards centralisation, poor transaction speed, and lack of governance mechanisms, CEO and Founder of Cypherium notes. “It will be a long time before blockchain really enters the mainstream,” he says. Among the biggest challenges for the crypto world is also the misuse of cryptocurrencies and hacking. Many people have accidentally lost their wallets, or been hacked due to a lack of protective measures.
Creating solutions with a better user experience is crucial to the industry. The key challenge is to build products that can make the complexity disappear, Philipp Pieper, co-founder of Swarm Fund says. “We are just at the beginning of moving from the protocol layer to higher application layers. As the industry grows at insatiable speeds, we are experiencing friction from the lag between the adoption and availability of scalable solutions. The current where to buy generic levitra complexity around the use of digital assets, especially when it comes to keeping credentials and passwords secure is a challenge that requires thinking about, but I am con dent that with all the innovation in the space and the focus it’s getting from the global developer community, we will get there faster than in other industries Benefits of crypto and blockchain include the democratisation of money, best-in-class security and traceability for each transaction made, and the introduction of a new paradigm for launching world-changing startups. Blockchain provides a ledger of transactions but can be extended (as in the case of Ethereum) to do much more. We are starting to see a variety of global economic mechanisms becoming unlocked, according to Dan Gailey, the CEO of Synapse AI.
Its implementation allows decentralised services and applications to exist, where each person can participate in the network in many different ways, without the need for a central authority or gatekeeper, he says.
Patrick Palacios, CEO at Appsolutely and LoyalCoin creator, believes that crypto is on the verge of upending the current middleman-laden financial and transaction systems, provided the established players don’t adapt quickly to blockchain. “Blockchain and smart contracts replace the intermediate processes. However, the automatization of the processes, as well as their new format do not abolish the regulation established for economic activities,” Ulyana Shtybel, VP at HighCastle argues.
Blockchain tech opens a trustless and borderless world. It is the frontier of the next generation of payments, Sky Guo, CEO and Founder of Cypherium, insists. We are already seeing some use cases, such as trans-border remittance payments, where cryptocurrencies on the blockchain are doing a better job at a lower cost than banks. And we also see how the crypto world builds new connections with traditional financial markets to adapt crypto to everyday life.
As an example, on 25th January Vaultbank introduced Debit VB MasterCard for everyday cryptocurrency transactions. It is compatible with point-of-sale terminals, offering cardholders the ability to spend various cryptocurrencies and may eventually be able to spend Vaultbank tokens. Vaultbank’s debit card will be available to U.S. and E.U. customers upon the conclusion of its token sale.
What can we expect tomorrow for the exponentially growing crypto industry? In this new reality, financial institutions and transactional middlemen will adapt to the new ow of value and reconsider the idea of compliance. “This will essentially force them to rethink their systems and architectures so that they comply to the new decentralised economy, and the shi of power to the individual, or face being rendered irrelevant. Data being truly owned and in the hands of the individual, combined with machine learning and AI, will be the crucial elements that will power the data revolution,” – Philipp Pieper, co-founder of Swarm Fund, predicts.
A deeper understanding of the technology by governments and regulations is the important issue for further industry development. The lack of knowledge results speculations about the validity of cryptocurrencies. Eagle An believes, that without government support, some of the blockchain technology infrastructures and applications will be blocked from happening. Blockchain technology is sophisticated to many people without deep technical knowledge. As Dan Gailey, the CEO of Synapse AI, says, it is extremely important to help people understand what’s available, how to make sense of it, and how they can leverage this technology in new interesting ways.
Kate Goldfinch, Editor at the Fintech Times
