Long before youtube, skype, twitter, blogging and cloud computing. Nicolas Negroponte — Director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — drew the following diagram to represent convergence of the computing, telecommunications and content industries.
In the late eighties, if you wanted a make a phone call, you had to use a landline or a mobile phone. To watch videos, you needed a video player. To listen to music, you needed a music player. To read a newspaper, you had to buy a physical one and to run software, you had to install it on your computer.
What is now obvious is that the internet protocol made it possible for these three industries to speak the same language. We can now make phone calls, watch videos, listen to music, read newspapers and use software on the internet.
Convergence changed how we consume these services as well as how they are produced. Production of videos, music, news and opinions became decentralized. Anyone can create videos on youtube, music on spotify or publish a blog.
We are at the threshold of a new convergence. The coming together of “money” creation, trading and transfer. The blockchain is the technology shift that makes this convergence possible.
copyright 2018 — www.tokenchanger.io
Before proceeding, let’s understand the scale of of this convergence. The total market for money creation (stable tokens) is all the money in the world — $90 trillion. The daily volume for spot forex transactions is $1.6 trillion. Global money remittances was worth $575 billion in 2016.
There are already a mish mesh of services that portend what is to come. There is Tether and TrueUsd, that offer blockchain based money backed by USD in the bank. There is Ether Delta and Ox that offer blockchain based trading systems.
The basic condition for convergence is that money creation, trading and transfer must be a seamless experience for the end user. This means that these three activities must happen on the same blockchain.
Bitshares currently offers the best possible condition for convergence. With its graphene blockchain, smart coins and decentralized asset exchange. Start-ups like bitspark are adding the transfer component.
The use of stable tokens (usd, euro, yen etc) for cryptocurrency trading will serve as an enabler for convergence. The ethereum blockchain has the highest number of cryptocurrency tokens in circulation.
That is why Token Changer is betting that the first large scale implementation of convergence will happen on the ethereum blockchain. Token Changer uses ethereum as its primary blockchain.
On the Token Changer platform anyone can create stable tokens pegged to fiat currencies. The platform offers a point and click interface for trading tokens including stable tokens. For transfers, the platform implements DApps (decentralized financial applications) for licensed financial institutions. These DApps are used to move value in and out of the blockchain.
The whole process of creating, trading and transferring money is seemless for the end user. On the production side, minting of stable tokens is decentralized.