In the next handful of years, I do believe cryptocurrency use will become mainstream. This is informed by what some call the law of diffusion of innovation. Networked based technologies that experience sustained exponential growth and do so up to 8% global adoption, or the tipping point, always reach full adoption, assuming the exponential growth is not stopped before the tipping point. This has happened with adoption of technologies like the internet and the smart phone. Bitcoin adoption has been following this trend for over a decade and we’re right at the critical doubling from 4% to 8% of global adoption.
This is also why you’ll see a lot more attempts by the traditional financial system to attack and restrict cryptocurrency use. The global fiat Ponzi scheme prints trillions of dollars which decreases your purchasing power, harms the poor, and reminds us just how powerless we are to do anything about it. Some banks will close accounts associated with cryptocurrency exchanges and their users. Some cryptocurrency companies will be buried in legal battles meant to slow them down and restrict their freedom to provide useful services people want.
At the same time, other banks will move offshore and welcome crypto users. Jurisdictional arbitrage will increase as more companies take their services (and their now untaxed profits) outside of the United States. I do not believe governments can stop this because open source encryption is free speech and private keys (unlike gold in 1933 with executive order 6102) can be memorized and used covertly without any government able to stop it.
What can stop it? Problems within the industry itself.
Compromise.
Centralization.
Greed leading to mismanagement.
We’ve already seen versions of this last year with the Terra/Luna collapse, the Celsius collapse, and the FTX collapse (which is causing many other companies and funds to collapse).
The compromises leading to centralization and greedy mismanagement often have to do with a focus on obtaining revenue and profit and customers. That can mean optimizing the customer experience while sacrificing decentralization and transparency which can lead to corruption.
This is why I’ve been working on a way to make cryptocurrency use (for all tokens and all chains) easy for anyone in a decentralized way via the FIO Protocol. Instead of a confusing cryptocurrency address that might at first glance work for different networks (Polygon, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, etc. or Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, etc.), you can use a simple, human readable address like luke@stokes. You can own your own custom domain (like I own stokes) and control whether or not others can register crypto handles on your domain. Instead of worrying about sending to the wrong address, you can ask for a FIO Request to be sent to your crypto handle. This encrypted request will include the exact amount to send, the correct chain code and token code along with a private memo so you and the requester can keep track of what the transaction was for.
Alll of these features and more have been built into the FIO Protocol. The decentralized economic system rewards all participants who benefit the network via the FIO utility token which pays the validators of the network, the stakers who vote for those validators, the integration partners who enable the FIO user experience in their cryptocurrency applications, and the non-profit foundation which supports the protocol through development of the core chain, business development, marketing, partner relations, and more. The token is needed to purchase domains and crypto handles and pay for other on chain fees, but many of our partners and the FIO Dashboard hide that implementation detail so you can pay with other cryptocurrencies or with a credit card.
Mass adoption requires ease of use. Ease of use without compromise requires a simple decentralized user experience. This is what FIO does and why I’ve spent years working on this important project. We’re integrated in many different applications and service providers (over 80 at last count).
Free the money, free the world.
If you don’t have an account on an exchange that has FIO listed (BitMart for those in the US or Binance and others for those outside the US), you can also get an Ethereum wrapped FIO token using Metamask and Uniswap. You can then unwrap the token using the FIO Dashboard so you can use it to purchase your own domains and crypto handles. If you like speculating on domains, you can also use the FIO Dashboard to wrap the domains on the Polygon network and put them up for sale on OpenSea.
I’ll post some links below. If you care about cryptocurrency, please care about decentralized usability solutions and promote them to your network. We’re approaching the tipping point. This is more important than ever.
Get your own domain and crypto handle via the FIO Dashboard: https://dashboard.fioprotocol.io/
Purchase the wFIO token or provide liquidity to the pool here: https://info.uniswap.org/#/pools/0x937d916a12de773043139e79e58da8a4b93623ed
FIO Domains on OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/fio-domains
Integration partners: https://www.fioprotocol.io/ecosystem
If you’re using one of these wallets or exchanges, be sure to upgrade to the latest version and try out FIO! Some support more features than others with the Edge Wallet being one of the most fully featured wallet. Alty bot is really cool as well which allows you to have a FIO enabled wallet within a WhatsApp chat dialogue.