“The Shining Blockchain City” Down A Hill? – Svjatoslav (Svet) Sedov
As you, probably, aware, just to humor all of us or to have a retrospective view sometimes I like to review short and largely non-substantiated reports, which usually take form of infographic. Today both of those purposes will be served by “Blockchain: Growth, Use Cases & Facts” presentation published in May 2019 by “dotcominfoway” site, which belongs to a mobile applications development company (zic!).
The reason why I’ve chosen this obscure resource with its old presentation is that it pops up right on the top of my search list after I entered “blockchain use cases”. Well, thought I, might it be that even today this junk data is what most of us involuntarily keeping in our brains?
Let’s see. After two first slides named “What is blockchain?” and “How blockchain works?” there goes the third one — “Growth of blockchain technology”. It says: “number of monthly ICOs went from 8 to 200” (according to more reliable sources, like PWC — no more than 50 per month in 2019); “ICO investments increased 15 times” (instead, it has been steadily decreasing since its pick in 2018 of about $15 bln);
“14 countries exploring developing official cryptocurrencies” (it’s hard to verify, of course, but if we cut off all rumors and opinions the number of “official” confirmation of that “fact” would be like none); “$2.1 billion global spending on blockchain solution” (varies from 1 to 3); “$20 billion blockchain market in 2024” (varies from 10 to 80); “69% banks currently experimenting with blockchain” (the obvious non-sense). Well, you’ve got the picture.
Of course, one BS presentation is absolutely not enough to form any foregoing conclusions but it might be symptomatic nonetheless. Frantically feeding to ourselves all available bits and bites of positive information trying hard to ignore negative signals has became an important part of DLT “culture”. At the same time, some important fundamental indicators are not looking good at all.
For example, the proverbial “use case” still, after more than two years of active market development, remains a rare beast in DLT jungles, which only big corporations are sufficiently equipped to hunt for. The number of daily users for the most popular b2c/c2c dapps still is not exceeding 4k and it doesn’t look like it’s growing. Practically, on the business side (generating real profits), what we have reportedly left are MoE-SoV-UoA, ICOs/IEOs/STOs and exchanges.
Of course, we have some promising prospects like DeFi, DLT Gaming and “digitalized” RE, which have a potential to join this “list”, but with regulatory pressure on those types of businesses constantly rising around the world, might it be that the road to “the shining DLT city upon a hill” is a bit longer than most of us currently anticipate?
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Published at Fri, 23 Aug 2019 23:14:09 +0000
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