I met Brendan Blumer this week...
Brendan is the CEO of a blockchain-technology company called block.one. The company is pioneering the use of blockchain technologies to create new, user-owned, user-controlled software applications. The idea is revolutionary and hard for most people to wrap their heads around because it's an entirely new form of commerce – one that lacks a central controlling firm.
Many economists have theorized that in the absence of transaction costs and in a world of perfect property rights, we wouldn't need a firm to exist. (See the late British economist Ronald Coase's work, "The Nature of the Firm," and "The Problem of Social Cost." He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for these ideas in 1991.)
Blockchain technology provides perfect property rights. And the use of massive computer networks enables virtually cost-free transactions. In other words, technology has finally enabled what these business theorists long dreamed about. That's what makes these ideas so powerful and ripe for a reflexive outcome.
Brendan and his team have built a platform that enables developers to build enterprise-worthy and massively parallel blockchain applications that can handle colossal numbers of transactions every second. The software is called EOS. And rather than license the software to its users or sell subscriptions to access the platform, they've instead sold "tokens."
These tokens dictate who will be allowed to build applications (like a mortgage registry) on the EOS blockchain and how they'll be compensated.
But just as important, these tokens don't convey any ownership of the blockchain. That's because this is a new form of commerce, one that doesn't exist because of a firm. This new environment will only exist because its users have decided it's a great platform and they've decided to build their applications on it.
These tokens – the EOS blockchain and Brendan's company, block.one – are almost completely a product of reflexivity. Users have decided that this software is great. As a result, they've bid heavily to buy these tokens, which are released in batches every 23 hours. So far, block.one has raised $500 million in token sales. This income can be used to build applications on the EOS blockchain, making it far more likely that it will succeed.
All of this is fascinating and deserves careful study. This new world of open-source software controlled by its users (rather than a firm) promises intense and severe competition for many of the world's most dominant businesses today.
Consider a Facebook application on the EOS blockchain, for example. Facebook would no longer own your content. And users whose posts and pictures generate the most page views would receive the advertising revenue they generate because there's no firm to keep the profits.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times says investors have foolishly spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying "nothing."
Excerpt from Stansberry Digest