by April Bewell, content manager, Coinvest.
Companies are driving adoption of blockchain technology, with many people calling it the next internet.
When the dot-com bubble burst, many people thought that was it, an expensive technology, gone bust. However, it was a turning point in the history of the internet. Bubbles and consequent shakeouts are common for all technological revolutions. And out of the dot-com bubble burst emerged Web 2.0, to use the internet quickly and easily without knowing a bunch of IT jargon and commands.
Apart from ease of use, one of the foundations of Web 2.0 is that it is social. It is participatory and interoperable. With Web 2.0 people can finally share their ideas, expertise, and knowledge, nay even just daily life such as the food they ate, the vacation they took, or their beef with their boss. And so long as it is public, anybody can access it on any machine without the need for a special software. No longer is it a domain for the geeks and the nerds, Web 2.0 is the tide that overturned the internet.
What is Crypto 2.0?
The crypto industry is following the same path as the internet, with bear markets playing an important role in bringing Crypto 2.0 to the forefront. Bitcoin was only the beginning. Far from having “crashed”, blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are more important than ever, new applications and use cases are popping up with surprising regularity in a number of different industries, from farming, fintech and music to name a few.
Unfortunately, there is still a huge divide between experts trading and common people investing in the crypto markets. Existing platforms on the market today are convoluted, filled with tech jargon and lengthy sign-up practices. This means that investing in cryptocurrencies is a difficult and intensive process, especially for the average consumer. While blockchain technology is revolutionary, many people don’t understand it, with the average consumer thinking only a tech genius is able to use and understand the technology. Moreover, everything is divisive, there’s no easy way to cross protocols, and still far from social.
The Age of Crypto 2.0 is Driving Adoption
Newcomers to the scene, with experience in the area of usability and user-friendly apps and web solutions, are zeroing in on these very problems, and striving to find solutions in order to eventually achieve mass adoption.
A New Era of Personalized Portfolios
One such company is Coinvest. With Damon Nam at the helm, a 16 year IT services professional at Microsoft, he certainly knows how to build a product for the masses. Aiming to simplify investing for the general public Coinvest is now aiming to launch two exchanges, Coinvest and Coinvest Plus. While each has different target markets, both are designed with the user experience in mind.
With Coinvest, users can trade directly from their Coinvest cryptocurrency wallet and invest in hundreds of cryptonized assets and indexes using only the COIN token. The platform has clearly been designed with simplicity in mind, catering to the average and retail investor. This is not only easy to use but would soon be social as well, as the company would be adding the ability to copy-trade other users’ indices.
For retail and institutional investors, they have designed Coinvest Plus -a cryptocurrency exchange that allows users to trade cryptonized assets together. The platform offers a host of tools such as statistical charts and an advanced order book matching system.
Rewarding The Creators
Change is not only happening on exchanges like Coinvest. Crypto 2.0 is attempting to fix the cesspool of advertisers stealing users attention and the networks getting rich out of selling out users information on social media websites. At its very basic, networks like Facebook and Youtube are all about having advertisers pay for the audience’s attention, and the network takes a middleman’s fee. Which leaves the creators high and dry, taking meager earnings from what they have created. Not to mention the many unsavory results of uninhibited advertising that serves hate propaganda and politicians through these platforms.
One platform that is generating a lot of interest in the genre of rewarding is the Brave Browser. This browser allows users to reward creators they like and also rewards users that use the browser with the ads enabled. Not only does this allow users to earn money for consuming content but it also gives back control to the users and creators of said content, instead of centralized third-party platforms. And because it is decentralized and private, users own their data, control their own content and get paid directly by users who want to view it.
Brave is still in evolving in terms of UX, design, and a user-friendly experience but with their recent successes, it is evident that when given the choice, a lot of people will prefer the social media and browser sites that they directly control and benefit from.
Connecting the Dots with Payments Systems
Admittedly, one of the failings of Crypto 1.0 is the inability of users to use crypto for the simple act of buying anything, due to slow transaction times coupled with high fees. Ironically, 10 years, after buying the first pizza with 10,000 BTC, we are nowhere near the dream of using crypto to pay bills and send money. Which is understandable, because the focus has mostly been about building platforms. We are now beginning to see real-world adoption such as ATM’s and e-commerce solutions that allow people to buy things as basic as tomatoes.
With Crypto 2.0, adoption and interoperability is now becoming more synonymous. In third-world countries, where connectivity and bank access is still a major problem, the blockchain and cryptocurrencies are making headway. For example, in Mombasa, Kenya, the Bancor Wallet on the POA Network is digitizing and tokenizing the Sarafu Credit System allowing the community to use their Bangla-Pesa currency for transactions on the blockchain. Because of the platform’s interoperability, they can also convert their Bangla-Pesa for Ng’ombeni-Pesa (another neighboring community currency that couldn’t be easily converted to before.)
In the Philippines, one of the frontrunners of crypto adoption is Coins.ph, a crypto wallet that also serves as a remittance and bills payment system. It allows easy sending of both crypto and fiat to other people without any huge inconvenience and people can even pay their electricity bills, tax, insurance in crypto too. Their 5 Million users can easily cash in and cash out at the neighborhood 7–11 or the many remittance centers in the country.
Where Will Crypto 2.0 Take Us?
In the current bear market, the people’s mind is diverted to prices, losses, and the instability of the market. Gloom and doom permeate major news outlets and the social media. But the truth is, the prices only make half the story of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Coinvest, Brave, Bancor, and even Coins.PH, affirms that technology can only move forward. In order to be a solution for the many people who wish to take part in this new revolution, we have to strip off the descendent technology down to its core usage and present it in a new and meaningful way that will make sense to its new users. Crypto 2.0 will take blockchain further to the mainstream until it becomes so pervasive that people will forget that they’re even using crypto and the blockchain in their daily life.