The year 2018 did not bring the reversal on the cryptocurrency market expected by many optimists, but the pessimistic predictions that the market would be buried due to the massive collapse of the ICO benchmarks that failed to realize their startup ideas did not materialize either. Of course, in the coming year we are still waiting for a lot of surprises and unexpected turns, but in general we can expect a transition from a quantitative model to a qualitative one, only strong players and strong projects will survive this time, carrying their flag of innovative ideas to the international community.
The truth is no less important, but in my opinion the main issue will be the growth in the number of end users involved in each individual project. After all, someone with confidence declares that the revolution time has come for the Internet and the new world will be built on the blockchain technology, and therefore all users will eventually experience the benefits of this technology and developments based on it. However, is their optimism so pertinent. The vast majority of the available solutions are not so bad and the use of the blockchain is simply not relevant for them. We watched as investors and ordinary users realized this thought during the past year, when the share of “successful” ICOs who collected at least the soft cap was constantly decreasing. Technological and innovative ideas had to face the cruel realities of the market, when the question of the payback of the project arose before the question of its feasibility. Even the presence in the assets of the finished MVP did not guarantee the project successful fees.
Why am I raising this topic? It so happened that by participating in one large corporate competition to search for technological leaders and create personnel reserve for the gradual transfer of the defense industry complex to civilian products, I finally reached the final and came very close to the full-time defense of one of my projects to choose from. About a month is left for revision and preparation of a business case. True, some participants who are keen on the language, especially those who were eliminated at the stages of the qualifying round, have already expressed on a separate platform for this, their dissatisfaction and opinion that the entire competition was started to get hundreds of working projects for the corporation without much investment. Superficially filling in the many sections of the project card, I cannot disagree with them. Too ambitious demands put forward to the final result and in the good, or rather, it is more correct to involve in the work a whole team of different specialists. From the idea and development of the prototype, legal support, feasibility study and plans for promotion, to market entry and sales. On the other hand, the selection of forty people for one final place, seems to oblige everyone to tense well, good for theory and practice were not stingy, and each lecturer was pleasant and interesting to listen to. Although, as in any business, there were many nuances.
Approaching the final with three project ideas, I expected that I devoted one use to the blockchain. However, trying to reformat corporate and highly specialized solutions into really large-scale and useful ready-made platforms for many, I ran into the problems described above. There are clear directions, especially in the public sector, in which you can move, but they have been lying on the surface for so long. Yes, of course, the transfer of many of them to the blockchain would be useful, but from the point of view of the average consumer, this would simply be state services to which it would be possible to periodically turn for reliable information. It is clear that devoting oneself to a long period of time to the Voice, one wants to carry not only practical utility, but also use social tools that will attract users every day.
Unfortunately, the real market has so far proved to be tough with respect to such projects, while allowing for the successful use of technology in the corporate sector. Let's see what the 2019 year prepared for us, who knows, maybe we are standing on the threshold of something bigger, and a new legend is born before our eyes ...