Blockchain

Remember blockchain? Yeah, that new techie thing most people had NEVER heard of until about a year ago. Now? Yeah we ALL know what blockchain is.....kinda anyway. Well, it's got a whole lot more uses than ANYONE could have imagined, nd, it's just getting bigger and faster. No matter what anyone says, blockchain, with its distributed ledger technology (DLT), is just beginning it's innovative evolution. For gosh sakes, even Jamie Dimon likes blockchain's applications.

(Bill Taylor/CEO)


"The blockchain space has been innovating at an incredible pace over the past year. The total number of initial coin offerings (ICOs) was probably less than 10. If someone had told you that insurance company AIG was conducting a multi-country smart contract test, you’d have thought they were crazy. Certainly, the idea of putting an Arkansas chicken farm on a blockchain would have seemed ludicrous. The question of when blockchains would hit the mainstream was a legitimate one. Ethereum was under $10 and Bitcoin was under $650 a year ago. You know what has happened since then. Bitcoin is above $4,500, Ethereum is above $300, and ICOs have surpassed early stage VC funding. So what accounts for the intensity? While there are elements of frenzy/bubble, I think the story is much bigger than that. Legendary venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote of the emerging blockchain space last year:

I believe that business model innovation is more disruptive that technological innovation. Incumbents can adapt to and adopt new technological changes (web to mobile) way easier than they can adapt to and adopt new business models (selling software to free ad-supported software). So this new protocol-based business model feels like one of these “changes of venue” as my partner

Brad

likes to call them. And that smells like a big investable macro trend to me.

Over the past year, the earliest students and practitioners of blockchains and decentralized systems recognized the real innovation, the so-called “killer app” of the blockchain era: the ICO (or the more SEC-friendly version, known as a “Token Generation Event”), but not because it’s a way to raise money for an entity. This isn’t about creating a crypto-Kickstarter...."

Full Story at VentureBeat