Software, websites and tokens

This is the 3rd and last part of a series of stories about the blockchain wave.

In the first part, I made the case that we’re witnessing the beginning of a new technological wave akin to what the PC and Web waves have been 40 and 20 years ago. In the second part, I argued that we should not expect this new wave to compete or replace what was built previously.

The large winner of the PC wave has been Microsoft, which was able to build a platform on which native software (which was not called “apps” then) could thrive. Google, more than Facebook, has been the real winner of the web wave by building a platform which allowed for website discovery and later, (paid) distribution.

We can see that the code “containers” for the PC and web wave have been respectively softwares and websites and the winning platform for each has built a virtuous circle in which the larger the ecosystem was, the more useful the platform became, and the more used the platform was, the more ecosystem can grow.

In the blockchain world, the code container is called a “smart contract”. You may argue that Bitcoin, the largest blockchain by most measures, does not support smart contracts, but I would note that, in practice, a BTC transaction is actually a basic smart contract which guarantees that said transaction is valid (no double spend). Exactly like PC software can take many forms, from a command line application to full screen immersive gaming experience, smart contracts, often with their “attached” token, have many forms: from computer storage currencies to crypto-kitties…

Contrary to popular belief, tokens existed before the internet ;)

If 2017 was anything, it was an explosion in the number of “tokens”. There are now thousands of them and the growth does not seem to be slowing down. It is often difficult to even keep track of their core characteristics (see Phil Glazer work on that front): fungible, divisible, transferable, limited in supply, pre-mined, burnable, active, passive… They can classified them from an investment perspective, because this is what ICO’s have been all about, but it is not impossible to imagine other types of non-security tokens which would represent ownership, access or even identity.

From real estate with Pangea to collectibles through CryptoKitties , tokenisation is in progress. Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world: tokens may very well be the knife and forks used to achieve that!

This explosion brings a lot of challenges, from custody (how to keep track of a my hundreds of tokens?), to interoperability (how can I use my crypto-kitten to bet on prediction market?), through governance (who’s in charge, is there actually anyone in charge?).

Each of these big problems may have a multiple competing solutions. The blockchain world already has dozens of wallets which are attempting to solve the custody challenge and hundreds of exchanges which are trying to bring liquidity, but maybe another challenge, once unlocked, will prove even more fruitful for the growth of the token ecosystem.

One of the most frequent comments I hear about Blockchain technology is “it’s too late”. Of course, for some people, this is about the short term financial gains, but sometimes, other people assume that the technology landscape has started to settle and that the winners of today are going to remain the winners of tomorrow.

History shows that it’s often worse to be too early than too late. After all, Google was yet another search engine on a list which already included a dozen. But more importantly, the current scale of the blockchain ecosystem is orders of magnitude smaller than what many of us expect it to be, eventually. In the same way that newtonian physics works at “human” scale but fail to explain phenomenons at the atom scale, we should expect that new problems and challenges will emerge as the token ecosystem grows beyond its early adopters crowd.