Gamecredits is not like other cryptos. One of the reasons is its structured approach to business development – but not to infrastructure.
Crypto adoption is at the tipping point right now. It’s had two or three years stuck at the starting line, ever since bitcoin and blockchain became popular enough to be registered by the business world but before they quite figured out how to use them profitably. 2017 is going to be a big year for mainstream crypto, with gamecredits hopefully being a significant strand of that.
There’s a fine line to walk with crypto adoption. Cryptocurrencies are, by nature, decentralised. They are peer-to-peer protocols based on open blockchains hosted on computers distributed all over the world. Remove that and you essentially kill what a crypto is, and everything that makes it distinctive and useful. The attempts by some banks to create permissioned ledgers that feature a control layer have been met with derision by much of the crypto community: add a gatekeeper and you necessarily add a gate. With the introduction of a point of failure and a way to reverse and block transactions, this Corporate Crypto is technically and ideologically different to ‘true’ cryptocurrencies. It might have efficiencies over other forms of database, but it bears little resemblance to its libertarian predecessors.
But there’s a problem here too, because most cryptocurrencies also have decentralised communities and decentralised structures (if that’s not an oxymoron). That can make it incredibly hard to get anything done. When no one is in charge and no one can agree who is in charge, there’s a lack of overall vision and less reason for any given group to drive initiatives forwards. In many cases the devs are de facto community leaders – which frequently leaves business development in the doldrums. Some crypto communities have all but imploded into in-fighting, as otherwise promising initiatives are sabotaged by the ineptitude or malice of other groups and individuals. Decentralisation has its drawbacks.
Gamecredits sits somewhere in between these extremes. It is decentralised in terms of infrastructure – the open, unpermissioned blockchain that underpins every true cryptocurrency – but with an organised and experienced team leading business development. There is a corporate structure to gamecredits (it’s called GameCredits Inc.), which is composed of a mixture of Datcroft developers and marketing team and a number of people from the gamecredits crypto community.
Bitcoin managed to achieve adoption by virtue of first-mover advantage: for a long time, it was the only crypto out there. And bitcoin’s developmental stagnation is the perfect warning of what happens when governance is fully decentralised: nothing. Gamecredits’ small ‘c’ corporate crypto approach is a far cry from the Corporate Crypto (TM) of R3 or other major financial institutions, and it’s a long way from the ungoverned and ungovernable chaos of fully decentralised crypto communities. But it isn’t really a ‘best of both worlds’ approach. It’s the only way a crypto platform is going to get picked up and used.